In fact, the most sensible and logically consistent outgrowth of the atheist worldview should be permission to get for one’s self whatever one’s heart desires at any moment (assuming that you can get away with it). Why not have that affair? Why not take a few bucks from the Alzheimer victim’s purse — as it can not possibly have any meaning either way. Did not Richard Dawkins teach us that selfishness was built into our very genes?

I wonder if Jacques Berlinerblau will do a thoughtful erudite eloquent piece saying why that is ignorant and wrong. No, I don’t really. There is only so much time in a life, and with so many ignorant gnu atheists to beat up, ignorant theists just have to take care of themselves.

Furthermore, doesn’t Darwinism suggest that certain groups within a given population will develop beneficial mutations, essentially making them “better” than other groups? It would seem that racism would again be a natural conclusion of this worldview — quite unlike the theistic approach which would suggest that people have intrinsic value do to their creation in the “image of God.”

Much for you to do there, Professor Berlinerblau. Much ignorance and error. Still too busy?

At the end of the day, the reason that I can agree with many of the moral assertions that these atheists make is because they are not truly outgrowths of their purported philosophies, but rather of mine. I would suspect that the great majority of the atheistic understanding of morality comes directly or indirectly from what is commonly referred to as the Judeo-Christian ethic.

Directly or indirectly – well that makes it easy. Fine, have it your way, Rabbi: my understanding of morality comes indirectly from what is commonly but mistakenly referred to as the Judeo-Christian ethic, an “ethic” which is very different now from what it was when it was young, thus showing that not even your understanding of morality comes directly from “the Judeo-Christian ethic.” Whatevs.

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96 Responses to “EZ theist ethics”

Why is it a theist can ignore hundreds of years of secular philosophy, essentially pretending people like Kant or Hume don’t exist, without anyone clutching their pearls over the philosophical naiveté? Someone poke an accommodationist, they must all be asleep.

So does the Rabbi explain why he personally doesn’t stone gay men to death whenever he sees them? Surely he must not follow all of the rules on in the old testament, even though he seems to think that only divinely given morals count. Why doesn’t he keep slaves, or may multiple wives, or any of other horrible things that happen in the Bible?

I really get tired of people making these arguments. We don’t get our morals from the Bible, and neither to they, except in a very diluted, almost homeopathic sense.

So I have to say, the first I heard of this article was under your “Latest News” heading, and all I saw was the quotation you had provided: ““The atheistic understanding of morality comes directly or indirectly from what is commonly referred to as the Judeo-Christian ethic.” And I said to myself, that has got to be HuffPo. hehehe…

I’m not going to read it, and probably not even going to read this post all the way through. I can’t take much more of this shit. The term “Judeo-Christian ethics” is just so, so, so offensive and plain stupid. Is the good rabbi really trying to argue that nobody had figured out “Thou shalt not kill” prior to 4000BC?!??!?!??!???

OMFG, so I did read your post at least, and he’s pulling the old “Why not rape babies if you’re an atheist?” and “Darwinism therefore Hitler” lines?!??!? Has this guy even read a book, ever?!??

yeah, I shouldn’t have read your post. I seriously can’t take this shit. It’s the same old fallacious ignorant dog shit over and over and over again. Wait, sorry, one of my dogs saw me typing this and she’s very sad and offended now, like I am saying the little “bombs” she leaves in our backyard are somehow as stinky as the good rabbi’s ignorant spewings.

Gah. I’m done. No more reading attacks on atheism for me today. I’d rather go scoop the yard.

It would seem that racism would again be a natural conclusion of this worldview — quite unlike the theistic approach which would suggest that people have intrinsic value do to their creation in the “image of God.”

Happy is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

If that’s the intrinsic value due me, I’d rather not be created in the “image of God”.

What a terrible essay. I have to wonder what this guy has read about atheism and morality, because he is ill-informed.

Incidentally, I just wrote a post on the Center for Inquiry’s blog that relates to the sort of arguments put forth by the rabbi. My basic point was this:

In response to these arguments, atheists often cite the biological basis for morality, the rich history of secular moral reflection, the human ability to collectively reason toward more objective moral values, and empirical data that shows religonists are no more moral than atheists. But these attempts, while reasonable, are often an exercise in futility, as the theist will inevitably respond with arguments like those above. There is simply no getting around the fact that belief in God makes for an enormous stumbling block for discourse about morality.

Simply put, we cannot discount the importance of critically discussing religious belief, because it will continue to present a problem for rational, constructive moral discourse.

Further, how can they still push the ludicrous idea that morality comes from religion? Are their eyes as shut as their minds? Judeo-christian morality is a non starter, if the only reason that someone does the right thing is because they are frightened of hell or they are promised heaven, then they are not moral. People should do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.

The ironic thing about all of this is that the basis of ethics is empathy; our ability to model other minds also allows us to literally feel others’ pain. Empathy isn’t just a matter of feeling for others, but of understanding (which makes it essential is modelling other minds accurately). So love your enemies–it might not make them your friends, but even if you have to fight them, it will give you a better idea of how to win.

And yet, this rabbi has completely failed in the empathy department. He fails utterly to understand not only atheists, but everyone outside of his narrow cultural milieu.

Hoffman is something of a disappointment, but it seems he’s being treated to a stream of sophomores whose only introduction to his subject is a quick reading of The God Delusion, which would probably put most of us off of our lunch too. But on the subject of empathy, if Hoffman is sick after five years of this, he should try to imagine Dawkins’ state after being subjected to a steady stream of creationists for forty years!

The absolutist thinks: I would not harm a weak and fallible creature like me but I would inflict the utmost suffering on anyone who is an abomination in the sight of the Almighty. That’s absolutist morality.

Yes. I’ve been hoping it was some kind of irony I’m too thick to understand, but I think I give up now. He doesn’t even deal with comments fairly, and that Berlinerblau post is just…well it’s not convincing.

How do people who defend a book which advocates genocide and stoning people to death have the nerve to say that people who don’t believe in that book have no basis for morality? How can they give credit to their religions for equality, justice, etc. when the very God they’re defending advocates bigotry and injustice?

How can they give credit to their religions for equality, justice, etc. when the very God they’re defending advocates bigotry and injustice?

Because they’re selective about which bits of the bible they pay attention to. This shows that they are ethically developed, which is somehow thanks to their theism, even though it’s their theistic bible that they have to ignore parts of.

Laurence O’Donnell said this on his MSNBC show a few days ago and Nathan Bupp has been touting it as the deepest wisdom since Solomon. Srsly. The fact that theists realize that much of the bible is shite is somehow an argument in favor of theism.

‘Believers’ will never give up the ‘no morality without religion’ assertion, unfortunately many non-religious people have the same attitude. It’s basically ‘belief in belief’, and that’s what clerics, like the Rabbi, trade in.

I also doubt that the ‘Judeo-Christian Ethic’ has had much influence on modern Western morals and mores, otherwise we would still be living in medieval theocracies, rather like most Moslems.

Laurence O’Donnell said this on his MSNBC show a few days ago and Nathan Bupp has been touting it as the deepest wisdom since Solomon. Srsly. The fact that theists realize that much of the bible is shite is somehow an argument in favor of theism.

Everything is purported to be an argument in favor of theism. AC Grayling has mentioned this several times. In the view of the theist, everything counts as evidence in favor of the claim, and no evidence can be imagined that would falsify it. It’s a bit like how both tragedies and miracles seem to deepen people’s faith.

I think the purpose of posts like the rabbi’s is what what the coach does before the game with his team. He has the marker board on which he draws some arrows that no one really looks at. The idea is to raise the team spirit and annoying the hell out of the other team is a bonus. His real audience is the believer who gets a real kick from the “Team Judeo-Christian” hype.

I watched William Lane Graig “debunking” Dawkins’s arguments on YouTube and was genuinely surprised how weak his reasoning was. I came to the conclusion that he’s not even attempting to change anyone’s mind. What he’s doing is giving the faithful a good reason to think their worldview is rational: a sophisticated and articulate person with a PhD, who pauses in right places and sounds very very convincing.

I could be wrong and this post by rabbi Jacobs is a genuine attempt to engage with people who may not share his worldview, and he has just simply misunderstood the positions of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens. Perhaps he really cannot see how morality could arise from anything other than (an Abrahamic) religion and is honestly baffled when he writes ”Strange.” or ”What gives?” But then I’d have to think he is very stupid and totally unaware how his piece misrepresents and deeply insults atheists.

“I would suspect that the great majority of the atheistic understanding of morality comes directly or indirectly from what is commonly referred to as the Judeo-Christian ethic.”

Enough silliness already, Rabbi. Next time you pick up the book upon your religion is based, actually read it instead of using it as a source of magic incantations. There are few works of fiction so glutted with immorality. One could more easily take it as a parable of why we shouldn’t be religious.

Plato decisively dismantled any and every version of divine command moral theory roughly 24 centuries ago using perfectly clear and surprisingly easy-to-follow reasoning. The insistence by any educated person that atheists cannot be moral and that faith gives special insight into moral truths is a mark of intellectual dishonesty and willful abandonment of critical thinking — right up there with discussing astrology as if it had some sort of merit, or thinking that the ontological argument is plausible. Such tiresome, vapid pablum deserves only enough attention to express one’s contempt for it.

I think that everyone, on all sides of all debates, has to get over is the idea that people who hold opposing views are stupid. Hume said that reason is the slave of the passions–not only that, he said that it should be. In the latter judgment I think he was referring to ethics, but in the former I think he describes the broad range of religious and ideological beliefs.

A dumb person will indeed subscribe to stupid ideas without justification, but a smart person will construct, through heroic effort, an elaborate system of rationalizations for false beliefs. This is not to say that reason and empiricism cannot discern the truth, but that the thorny thickets of rationalization planted by smart people serve as a bulwark for all who hold questionable beliefs. And for those who desperately want to hold those beliefs, this bulwark is always good enough. What is missing here is an allegiance to the truth; too many people value their forgone conclusions above the truth, though they may not be aware of this. Unfortunately, the lacunae of these rationalizations can be so remote and abstract that most cannot understand the refutations for them, not necessarily for lack of intelligence, but also for lack of interest, effort, or motivation.

Good to see that more and more rabbis, priests and clergy are obviously from the shallow end of the gene pool, because fewer and fewer educated intelligent people want those jobs anymore. And I wonder, with the HuffPo strike going on, could they not find a proper writer ? Even for a broke outfit like them, to give an “atheists steal Alzheimer’s patients purses” moron a forum is surprising.

Further, how can they still push the ludicrous idea that morality comes from religion? Are their eyes as shut as their minds? Judeo-christian morality is a non starter, if the only reason that someone does the right thing is because they are frightened of hell or they are promised heaven, then they are not moral. People should do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do.

What is the right thing to do? I fear that your comment (among those of others here) exemplifies the irresponsibility of fellow atheists to fully accept the consequences of there being no god(s). We have to accept that there is no definitive ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ without a divine being declaring there to be. So, the religious people who aver that “atheists cannot condemn _________” are partly correct. They are correct to observe that without belief in God, we absolve the ability to ground our morality in something absolute. The existentialists of the 20th century recognized this and sought to work through this dilemma. We have to admit that our morals are emergent, creative, artificial. However, as responsible atheists, we can not only accept the artificial nature of our morality but the artificiality of everyone’s morals, including those of the religious, even though the religious believe theirs to be absolute. Atheists certainly can condemn acts of others, but the condemnation must always carry the caveat that it is based on ethics that are artificial by nature of being created by the minds of human beings.

As the dominant religion of Europe and the world it conquered, Christianity imported massive dollops of Greek philosophy to supply the deficiencies in its ethics and metaphysics, starting with the importation of Neoplatonism some centuries after the lifetime of Jesus, when it was clear that the End of the World had been postponed, and reaching high tide in the late medieval period with the patching of Aristotle into theology effected by Aquinas and some of the Schoolmen. Many of the ideas that are often attributed to a religious source in the modern period are therefore secular, non-theistic borrowings from the Greeks, bluetacked on to the incoherencies of faith, and rescued from that affiliation by the resumption of rational enquiry in the scientific revolution.

Existentialists…find it extremely disturbing that God no longer exists, for along with his disappearance goes the possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There could no longer be any a priori good, since there would be no infinite and perfect consciousness to conceive of it. Nowhere is it written that good exists, that we must be honest or must not lie, since we are on a plane shared only by [people]. Dostoyevsky once wrote: “If God does not exist, everything is permissible.” This is the starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and man is consequently abandoned, for he cannot find anything to rely on – neither within nor without. First, he finds there are no excuses…If, however, God does not exist, we will encounter no values or orders that can legitimize our conduct.

Sad and inconvenient, but true. All attempts by atheists to ground morality in something absolute and definitive is ‘bad faith’ or ‘eluding the Absurd’ as Sartre and Camus would suggest, respectively.

I think the purpose of posts like the [notable atheist]’s is what what the coach does before the game with his team. He has the marker board on which he draws some arrows that no one really looks at. The idea is to raise the team spirit and annoying the hell out of the other team is a bonus. His real audience is the [atheist] who gets a real kick from the “Team Atheist” hype.

All attempts by atheists to ground morality in something absolute and definitive is ‘bad faith’ or ‘eluding the Absurd’ as Sartre and Camus would suggest, respectively.

I’m curious who you’re talking about. Is it Harris?

If so, I suspect you’ve misunderstood Harris, as many people have. (And that’s partly his own fault—IMO he mis-states his own basic theses sometimes, and you have to follow his arguments and examples to see what he’s really getting at. The Moral Landscape is a better book than it seems to people who don’t “get it”—or there’s a much better book in there trying to get out, or something.)

I don’t hear a lot of atheists talking about “absolute” and “definitive” morality, but I do hear some talking about a minimal, useful moral consensus that can rightly be called “objective” in a useful sense. (Not Objectively Prescriptive in Mackie’s sense, if you know what that means, but quite good enough to be going on with.)

I’m not sure what you’re talking about, but I suspect that there’s less “bad faith” going around in atheist ethics than you think.

IMO a lot of the metaethical arguments are about semantics in both the vernacular and technical senses—how words refer, and what makes a statement true or false despite false presuppositions.

Philosophers of various metaethical stripes—e.g., sophisticated moral relativists, sophisticated moral realists, and error theorists—actually do agree a lot on what’s “right” and “wrong.”

For example, when the Taliban types throw acid in little girls’ faces for going to school, philosophers would generally agree that’s “wrong,” even if they might feel obligated to put scare quotes around it. When two guys in San Francisco get married, though, that’s not wrong.

To see throwing acid in a schoolgirl’s face as morally justified, you generally have to believe a lot of falsehoods—e.g., that women are naturally inferior, that there’s a God who made them that way and wants them to stay in their places, that uppity women mess up the functioning of society in ways that harm themselves and others, etc. To see two guys getting married as wrong, you similarly have to believe a fair bit of bullshit about human nature and probably God.

There’s a kind of morality that philosophers generally converge to in light of facts and reason, even if they argue over whether it’s “real” or “objective”—and mostly they’re arguing over what the words “real” and “objective” even mean—that seems to be grounded in human nature. (E.g., the kind of empathy and concern for fairness that makes us think harming little girls for crazy-ass reasons is wrong, and that denying gays equal rights for crazy-ass reasons is wrong too.)

Truly, there’s no god to agree or disagree with such judgments, and no supernatural basis for them. If you’re a stone sociopath, you’re not going to really care even about the easy cases, like disfiguring girls for stupid reasons. And if you’re largely selfish—as most of us are—you’re inevitably going to have conflicts between your selfish drives and your altruistic drives, and you’re going to have to make hard choices, and it’s up to you.

I think essentially all atheistic moral philosophers of all metaethical stripes agree with the existentialists about that. That’s not what they’re arguing about.

I was not talking about anyone in particular, just those atheists that do try to ground their morality in something absolute. I started a thread at the Friendly Atheist forums and a handful of atheists tried justifying morality on human nature or on that ‘consensus’ that you mention. It just seems like a last ditch and desperate attempt to be sure about morality after abandoning the belief in god.

For example, when the Taliban types throw acid in little girls’ faces for going to school, philosophers would generally agree that’s “wrong,” even if they might feel obligated to put scare quotes around it. When two guys in San Francisco get married, though, that’s not wrong.

I cannot imagine that any error theorist would agree that either of those were right or wrong. Error theory is a form of moral nihilism — a perspective that recognizes no “right” or “wrong”.

Humanist values and principles are very appealing to me, please don’t misunderstand me. I aspire to achieve a humanist lifestyle. However I will always be aware that those humanist values and principles have no absolute basis in the world, and they are merely products of human experience and reasoning. Most people it seems, theist and atheist alike, wish to find firm grounding for their moral values and principles, and continue living with the illusion that they have moral certainty. I think that is a partial commitment to a godless worldview, whereas a full commitment entails an acceptance of moral skepticism / nihilism. Many do not wish to travel far down that path, for it can get dark and there’s no stars or moon to guide the way.

To see throwing acid in a schoolgirl’s face as morally justified, you generally have to believe a lot of falsehoods

So if you could comprehend every bit of objective, materialistic data in the situation of a young girl getting acid thrown on her face, you would arrive at the conclusion, with moral certainty, that that was “wrong” behavior? Hume is still right: an ought cannot be derived from an is.

The idea that moral certainties can come from human intuition, that objective moral instincts evolved over time, has its own conceptual problems. Any non-orthodox religious person is accused of cherry-picking from their sacred text when it comes to the morality they derive from it, however it seems as though some atheists are willing to cherry pick from human instincts in an attempt to establish moral certainty. Of course our capacity for empathy is considered the holy grail of a socio-biological basis for morality. Why not establish a morality around the human capacity for judging humans with different skin color / ethnic affiliation / belief system / culture to be worth less than the community / class of people they are most familiar with? What are we to make of our natural capacity to believe that certain moral transgressions are worth the penalty of death? To suggest that the harm principle shall be the prime basis for any true morality is a bias coming from a liberal temperament. From what I read and observed, some things like justice, honor / respect, and duty / obligation are deemed by some to be more important than having empathy for someone. And there’s no way to determine which one of those values should be prioritized. It’s completely artificial. That’s the moral dilemma as far as I can tell.

Diversity in morality is mostly not attributable to a difference in knowledge about facts. For example, when the U.S. and European countries finally outlawed slavery, this did not involve a discovery of facts. Whenever gay people are allowed to marry in a state within the U.S., the opportunity does not come from a discovery of facts. The change comes as a part of the moral zeitgeist, which moves in no particular direction, and is the result of the re-prioritizing of values and transformation of attitudes.

you’re inevitably going to have conflicts between your selfish drives and your altruistic drives, and you’re going to have to make hard choices, and it’s up to you.

That sounds right to me. We have competing ‘drives’ and ‘appetites’, it is up to human reasoning and creativity to devise moral codes that value some instincts while devaluing others. None of the codes are more true than the others though.

Sorry for the book – I 100% understand that you will likely not address half the things I said lol.

Diversity in morality is mostly not attributable to a difference in knowledge about facts. For example, when the U.S. and European countries finally outlawed slavery, this did not involve a discovery of facts. Whenever gay people are allowed to marry in a state within the U.S., the opportunity does not come from a discovery of facts. The change comes as a part of the moral zeitgeist, which moves in no particular direction, and is the result of the re-prioritizing of values and transformation of attitudes.

Andrew, I’ll have to completely disagree with you here. The progress in getting rid of racism and sexism in modern societies has come primarily through the discovery of new facts. Even a universal moral code like the golden rule: “Do onto others as you would have them do onto you” is limited by what we define as “others”. In biblical times slavery was fine since slaves were considered less than others. “Others” meant other Israelites. Paul extended this to include gentiles but there were still limits to this new inclusiveness as slavery was still religiously acceptable up till the nineteenth century. It has only been the discovery of new facts (for instance that slaves could be educated to the same level as their masters or the insights about the close relationship between different human groups provided by sciences such as evolutionary biology and anthropology) that finally placed the institution of slavery in the category of immoral.

To suggest that the moral zeitgeist moves in no particular direction is laughable. Since the enlightenment it moves in the direction dictated by the scientific discoveries of the time. We don’t burn astronomers at the stake any more since the population at large realizes that they are simply telling us about physical facts about the cosmos and simply stating a fact about the cosmos, whether it is contradicted by scripture or not, is not a valid reason to execute someone. We don’t allow slavery or certain races because we realize now that all human races are closely related, there is no superior or inferior group. We pay (or at least should pay) women the same as men for doing the same job because science has shown us that both men and women have no significant differences in ability.

In so much as things like gay people being allowed to marry, I suggest that this is very much due to the discovery of facts – for instance the evidence that homosexuality is not a choice and the evidence that religious teaching on this matter is based on no facts whatsoever.

[…] rabbinical voices attempting to talk sense to us new atheists. There’s David Wolpe and Adam Jacobs, and there was that debate where Hitchens and Harris were terribly rude and gnuish to Wolpe and his […]

I cannot imagine that any error theorist would agree that either of those were right or wrong. Error theory is a form of moral nihilism — a perspective that recognizes no “right” or “wrong”.

Certainly, error theorists object to the terms “right” and “wrong,” and the whole language of categorical obligations and prohibitions, but they generally nonetheless have similar basic preferences to realists and relativists, in informed reflection.

Your typical error theorist would really rather that the Taliban guys got a clue and realized that there’s no God, that women aren’t naturally suited to being uneducated, and so on—and that they’d therefore stop throwing battery acid in the faces of little girls who are so uppity as to go to school.

Likewise, your typical error theorist doesn’t prefer that a couple of guys in San Francisco not get married, because of some purported incompatibility between homosexuality and marriage. It’s okay by them. Whether you or they call that a moral preference or not, error theorists typically have the same basic kinds of underlying preferences as relativists and realists.

Such error theorists would generally prefer that society was organized such that throwing battery acid in schoolgirls’ faces was illegal, and that gay marriage was not—and they’d prefer those things for the same basic reasons that most relativists and realists would, i.e., out of benign concern for others’ well-being. Like relativists, they’d say it boils down to certain “subjective” preferences that they happen in fact to share with most other ethical philosophers, which are stable on reflection. They’d go further and say that talking about those things in terms of categorical obligations and prohibitions is generally erroneous, and would speak about it in terms of practical strategies for satisfying agreed-on preferences, rather than “right” and “wrong.”

I think that a bunch of typical ethical philosphers—relativists, realists, and error theorists—could come up with some special words for things that they recognize as “moral” discourse, but without the conceptual baggage that the error theorists object to.

Call that a “shmoral” vocabulary. In that vocabulary, you might have words like “shgood” and “shbad” to mean promoting and undermining general well-being—something they all do care about, even if they don’t call it a “moral” concern, just a “shmoral” one.

Among those philosophers, there’d probably be general agreement that Taliban acid-throwing is shbad, and that gay marriage equality is schgood, because gay marriage is not shbad.

(Even if some of the philosophers are actually sociopaths who are simply intellectually interested in morality “from the outside,” they’d still recognize the generally shared concern, even if they didn’t personally share it.)

Now suppose a moral realist says that antigay bigotry is bad, forgetting to say “shbad” to make explicit that he’s appealing to the shared reflectively stable preferences of those present. The error theorist might say “I disagree” but if the realist backs up and asks her “well, it’s shbad, right?” I think the error theorist is likely to say “of course it is. Obviously.”

What the error theorist disagrees with is not that acid-throwing is shbad or that gay marriage isn’t—well-informed, non-deluded people recognize the difference between those kinds of things in terms of a shared benign concern for others. What the error theorist objects to is certain presuppositions of the normal use of terms like “good” and ‘bad” and “right” and “wrong,” which she thinks have a certain kind of illegitimate “oomph” based on unanalyzed and erroneous presuppositions—i.e., that to say something is “bad” is to say something substantially more than that it’s the kind of thing we don’t like because we have a benign concern for others’ well-being.

A sophisticated moral relativist and the error theorist may agree with a moral realist that there’s something specially important and non-arbitrary about a benign concern for others as part of morality (naively construed) and shmorality, as well. They may agree that benign concern for others is a culturally universal feature of human moral systems, grounded in human nature, for evolutionary reasons. They may further agree that their shared shmorality is a peculiarly interesting natural kind, and not simply an artifact of their having modern, Western, liberal upbringing, education, and socialization. (Sophisticated moral relativists typically aren’t crude cultural relativists—even if they think what makes something “right” or “wrong” involves an appeal to shared values which aren’t “objective,” they don’t think it’s a mainly matter of agreeing with your own culture or not.)

In particular, our ethical philosophers may disagree on whether all first-order moral claims are mistaken in a certain way, as the error theorist insists, but still agree that many first-order moral claims are mistaken in a very different way, being based on plain errors of fact about the nature of morality itself (e.g., is it God-given, and what God supposedly gave us) and many morally relevant facts (e.g, about women’s and homosexuals’ psychology).

They likely all recognize (if they think enough about it) that the Taliban acid-throwers are mistaken in many important and shmorally relevant ways, and that their shbad behavior is a consequence of that. Likewise, they may recognize that a couple of gay guys in San Francisco are probably not making those kinds of mistakes when they decide to get married—the homophobes are factually mistaken to say that homosexuals are basically unqualified to enter into publicly committed long-term romantic relationships in a way that heterosexuals aren’t.

There may be—and likely is—considerable common ground between the error theorists and the others in terms of their shmoral preferences and many the implications of those preferences in reflective equlibrium.

What they disagree with the relativists and realists about is mainly whether to call shmoral preferences moral preferences, and whether accordingly calling certain things literally “right” and “wrong” illegitimately presupposes some other stuff about absolute objective prescriptiveness, inescapable bindingness, psychological “oomph” based in mistaken concepts of morality, etc.

The sophisticated realists and sophisticated relativists largely disagree about what the proper referents of terms like “moral” are—in particular, whether the kind of shmorality that philosophers tend to converge to in light of facts and rational reflection is the proper referent of “moral” in normal first-order moral claims—is the kind of “morality” that people tend to converge to when they’re not mistaken what the word “moral” actually means when used in earnest?

Arguably, it’s not, and the false presuppositions that most people make about morality are fatal.

But arguably it is—there’s reason to think that when people make moral statements, they’re not irrevocably committed to their false presuppositions about morality—e.g., absolute objective prescriptiveness in Mackie’s sense—and their moral claims can be salvaged and evaluated in informed reflection. (E.g., thinking that gay marriage is wrong, but then learning truths about homosexuality and marriage and morality, and deciding that it’s not morally wrong, and that heteronormative bias is morally wrong.)

That argument is largely “semantic,” in that it’s about whether and how we can decide what a word actually refers to when the speaker is seriously mistaken about the referent of the term, but might (or might not) learn otherwise.

I think that metaethical controversies tend to conceal a lot of consensus among ethical philosophers about first-order shmoral claims—e.g., that sociopaths are scary, that mean people suck, and that it sucks when false beliefs encourage people who aren’t basically sociopathic or especially mean to behave as though they were, and fuck other people over.

My impression is that the metaethical controversies also conceal a lot of agreement about second-order moral claims—e.g., that morality is a natural phenomenon of certain sorts and not others, that certain features of morality are due to evolved-in psychology that isn’t simply arbitrary and socially constructed, and that other features of morality are shaped by highly contingent social constructions within broad constraints imposed by evolved psychology.

There’s considerable disagreement on the details among ethical philosophers about the second-order facts (about morality)—e.g., how strongly ethical systems are constrained by the underlying evolved psychology, and how much cross-cultural reflect facts about convergent social evolution.

Those differences of opinion cross-classify with the metaethical issues. Three philosophers may agree on what’s evolved into the organism and what’s evolved into societies, and agree on what the resulting convergent shmorality is, but still disagree on how to talk about it, metaethically.

So, with one of the main arguments about morality without God being “empathy”, let me ask this:

Imagine that I’m on the autistic spectrum, with severely impaired emotional empathy, in the sense that I don’t generally feel empathy and therefore it provides no actual motivation for me in and of itself, but I am capable of at least generally using empathy to understand others. What motivation do I have for not acting the way the rabbi suggests atheists would?

If empathy would make you feel bad when you contemplate hurting someone else — because you in some sense feel their pain, as expected from the simulation theory of mind reading — and that pain motivates you not to do it, I submit that you’d just be doing what you want anyway. It just so happens that your make-up is such that you don’t want to hurt others. But for the person with and ASD, that benefit may not be there or may be severely lessened. However, they may be able to reason out when it’s better for them to not hurt someone and so not do it in those cases, and at the end of the day they may act just the same way you do … but that’s clearly a case like the rabbi describes, where it is indeed all about their own desires and they really don’t care for anyone else.

Also note that under this view of empathy you may be stopped from doing something that you really ought to do because of empathy, because you don’t like that emotional reaction even though by the morality you at least loosely hold you really ought to (a good example would be Utilitarians in the trolley cases).

To me, the ultimate test of morality is: are your actions independent of your desires beyond the desire to do what you think is morally right? Thus, the test cases are a) cases where you really don’t want to do something and you are strongly emotionally disposed not to do it, but you do it anyway and b) cases where you don’t do something despite desperately wanting to. The latter, obviously, is more common.

“There is simply no getting around the fact that belief in God makes for an enormous stumbling block for discourse about morality.”

I’m not certain you mean this to apply to individual discussions as opposed to the field at large, so forgive me if you mean the latter and not the former. But if the former, isn’t this a bit harsh? Yes, it can get in the way at times, depending on the specific beliefs of the theist. But it isn’t always such. There are a number of philosophers and even historically have been a number of philosophers who were theists — and even strong theists — and yet provided moral arguments that weren’t of the sort you describe. In fact, even some of the specific arguments about deriving morality directly from a god are reasonably solid arguments that are fairly honest. As a personal note, I don’t think my theism is in any way a stumbling block in any moral discussions, simply due to the fact that my theological position states that if there really is a morality, we as humans have to be able to figure it out by Christian theology.

So, yes, sometimes it’s a problem, but that seems rare enough that there’s no reason to bother to address it when doing morality generally, and there’s still a lot of work to do there.

I fear that your comment (among those of others here) exemplifies the irresponsibility of fellow atheists to fully accept the consequences of there being no god(s). We have to accept that there is no definitive ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ without a divine being declaring there to be.

Fear not! For anyone willing to crack open the Bible can see that there never were any definitive rights or wrongs declared from the gods of the Bible, either. Not only that, but there never were any gods; the whole story was made up by people as they went along their not-so merry way. The Bible: it’s all bupkis!

I’m sure atheists do it too. The most common way of attacking a position one doesn’t like is to misrepresent it in a way that makes the people who hold it look bad, also known as the strawman. It’s the way to score cheap points and it’s very frustrating to start defending your views from that set-up. What makes me pretty sure that the rabbi’s post was not written bona fide as a conversation starter is that he didn’t even bother to come up with any new strawmen but recycled the old one’s that atheists have been pointed out to be nothing but straw for years, some even for decades.

That Jacobs would write something like ”Did not Richard Dawkins teach us that selfishness was built into our very genes?” tells me the piece is directed at an audience that may not recognize it as the misrepresentation it is, but will just be glad to read how horrible the atheists’ worldview is. That’s why I see the column as nothing but arrows on the marker board.

To see throwing acid in a schoolgirl’s face as morally justified, you generally have to believe a lot of falsehoods

Andrew:

So if you could comprehend every bit of objective, materialistic data in the situation of a young girl getting acid thrown on her face, you would arrive at the conclusion, with moral certainty, that that was “wrong” behavior?

Yes, but not in the sense you seem to be assuming. Suppose I’m a complete sociopath and don’t mind a bit if you throw acid in a little girl’s face. Suppose I’m even a psychopath who gets a kick of it.

That doesn’t keep me from understanding that that the word “wrong” means something—that there’s an appeal to a certain kind of shared preference implicit in it, and in that sense it’s “relative,” but that it’s not an appeal to an unconstrained preference set. If anything counts as wrong, wantonly inflicting grievous harm on clearly innocent people for no good reason has to count, or we’ve left the universe of moral talk.

The general idea is that moral talk is necessarily relative in an important sense—it assumes at least certain minimal preferences—but that it’s not relative in a different sense; the minimal assumed preferences are not optional, and are cross-cultural. (And are apparently a consequence of human nature in some important sense, though maybe crucially also a function of social evolution.)

Hume is still right: an ought cannot be derived from an is.

Hume is certainly right in the sense that moral injunctions are not strongly Objectively Prescriptive or “inescapably binding” in a sense that some error theorists are worried about. To get a moral “ought,” you have to start with a moral “ought” or preference in some sense—e.g., an appeal to a certain minimal set of shared preferences or principles. You can explain it to a sociopath or psychopath, and they may fully understand what it means that something is morally bad, but of course they won’t be motivated in the right way if they don’t actually have that basic preference, themselves.

(By the way, IMO, even Sam Harris does get that—that’s a major reason he uses sociopaths as an example. He wants to show that he doesn’t think you can get from is to an actually motivating “ought” without having a relevant preference to start with. He does think that most people in all culture in fact do have that basic preference, which is a function of human nature, and that that’s enough to be going on with. He also thinks that you can get “from is to ought” in a weaker sense—you can identify what counts as a basic “moral” preference by analyzing how morality works before, during, and after informed reflection, and therefore identify what a moral “ought” is. You can objectively talk about what people do mean by a moral “ought,” and what people come to realize that “ought” can and can’t mean when they’ve thought it through—although you admittedly can’t make people automatically care about that, if they’re just not built that way. Rational argument can clarify existing preferences, and show which ones are more basic and more stable in light of relevant facts, but you can’t just reason preferences into existence from plain facts.)

The average atheist makes certain basic assumptions about reality: that we all exist as a result of blind and purposeless happenstance, that free will is illusory, that there is no conscious “self” and that there is no objective right or wrong.

I wonder if this guy has ever actually met and talked with an atheist …

What truly “boggles the mind” is Jacobs’ implication that the only reason to refrain from stealing is because God said so. And his claim that it’s the secular worldview that is racist, while the theistic is not, defies belief: the idea that all people have intrinsic value and ought to be treated equally — regardless of race, gender, or religion — is a modern, secular value, resisted mightily (to this day) by traditional religion. If Jacobs were not so arrogant and ignorant, he would realize that whatever parts of his own ethics are defensible are products of human rationality and secular thinking. And if he cares more about obeying the purported will of God than about the actual well-being of people in this world, then his morality is a disgrace, and he might stand to learn a few things from some atheists.

Oh, and he clearly hasn’t read The Selfish Gene, or he would have come across this:

I am not advocating a morality based on evolution. I am saying how things have evolved… I stress this, because I know I am in danger of being misunderstood by those people, all too numerous, who cannot distinguish a statement of belief in what is the case from an advocacy of what ought to be the case… If you would extract a moral from [this book], read it as a warning. Be warned that if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature… Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.

“Morality” is common to all societies. It is the inevitable outgrowth of the need for some kind of order, without which no reasonably coherent existence can be enjoyed. One can imagine what christian or jewish societies would be like without their fear of eternal punishments, but in practice I believe they would be the same as they already are. I’m impressed, in an unpleasant way, that the arch-promoter in the vatican of all this BS, and his many cardinals, don’t appear to live their lives as if they feared any kind of punishment at all, whether temporal or eternal.

Diversity in morality is mostly not attributable to a difference in knowledge about facts. For example, when the U.S. and European countries finally outlawed slavery, this did not involve a discovery of facts. Whenever gay people are allowed to marry in a state within the U.S., the opportunity does not come from a discovery of facts. The change comes as a part of the moral zeitgeist, which moves in no particular direction, and is the result of the re-prioritizing of values and transformation of attitudes.

I think you’re very profoundly mistaken here. A whole lot of diversity in morality–including the very examples you give—is very much dependent on errors of fact.

Whenever you have an institution like slavery or discrimination against homosexuals, in any culture, it is invariably supported by a whole host of rationalizations.

Every morally normal person in absolutely every known culture knows that slavery and discrimination are wrong all other things being equal. For example, consider slavery by Christians, despite the Sermon on the Mount, the vaunted importance of the Golden Rule, and very specific complaints about the horrors of slavery in the Old Testament.

Everybody knew that being enslaved generally sucks. Everybody knew that you morally shouldn’t do things that suck to others if you wouldn’t want them done to you—all other things being equal. (There’s always an escape clause.)

In order to ensure that people didn’t put two and two together and get slavery is wrong, many rationalizations were incessantly used:

1. It’s a shame to enslave black people, but they’re not equal, so it’s not as important not to enslave them as it was not to enslave the ancient Israelites, or us.

2. It’s a shame to enslave black people, but not really, because they’re not competent to live free and independent lives, and by and large, they’re happier being slaves because they’re better suited to it. They’re too stupid and irresponsible and shiftless to live their own lives, and need somebody to tell them what to do at all times. That’s what white people are naturally suited for.

3. It’s a shame to enslave black people, but it’s justified, because they’re morally inferior, so they don’t deserve the same moral consideration as us. They appear to be the descendents of Ham, who inherited his curse, and their designated role is to serve us.

4. It’s a shame to enslave black people, but we can only afford so much equality, and a certain amount of self-interest is morally tolerable. A certain amount of protecting ones’ family and class is morally tolerable as well, and we as a people just can’t afford to do without slaves. All other things being equal, it’d be nice if we could free the slaves, but given the realities, we can’t afford to do that.

5. It’s a shame to enslave black people, but they’re dangerous and socially unproductive and even destructive when running around loose and breeding like rabbits, so for the good of society as a whole, it’s better if we run the show than let them run it into the ground. For the greater good, they should take a subservient role, and we should be the competent managers.

6. it’s a shame to enslave black people, but only in this life. In the afterlife, any injustices will be redressed. And besides, we’re the Good Guys—Christians and all—and if we mess them up in this life, but take away their heathen religioins and give them Christianity, which is much better, on the whole it’s a good deal for them in the long run.

7. It’s a shame to enslave black people, but not nearly as big a shame as enslaving anybody else, because they aren’t really human—they don’t suffer the way we do in similar circumstances.

You can’t have an institution like slavery—or the Hindu caste system—with out all of these sorts of rationales being trotted out, because it’s obviously immoral without them. (The Hindu caste system is a great example. To justify treating people shabbily, you claim that they’re being punished for something they did in a past life. All other things being equal, it would be wrong to discriminate against them, but you have to enforce standards, and they were just asking for it.)

If there weren’t cross-cultural moral universals, e.g., a basic benign concern for others and an appreciation of fairness, these patterns of rationalization wouldn’t be universal—they wouldn’t even be necessary. If principles of moral reasoning were not universal, the rationales would not take the same basic forms cross-culturally, but they do.

There are deep reasons why outgroup victimization and exploitation are always justified in similar terms—the Other is stupid, morally weak, only fit for that, asking for it, too expensive to treat right, Not Like Us and thus not actually hurt as badly, Not Like Us and therefore harder to sympathize with (e.g., beastly, smelly), etc.

One deep reason is that everybody knows victimization and exploitation are wrong, all other things being equal.

Another deep reason is that each of those patterns of rationalization actually has considerable merit, on informed reflection, in some circumstances—if the Other really was stupid, dangerous, immoral, incompetent, destructive, and so on, we really would be justified in treating them somewhat differently, to protect everyone and advance the general good.

It does make sense for people to do what they’re actually reasonably well suited to. (E.g. retarded people mopping up at MacDonalds, if they don’t find it too unpleasant, rather than being, say, professors of philosophy.)

It does make sense to punish wrongdoers, all other things being equal, rather than to let them get away with it.

It does make sense to contain dangerous people, rather than letting them wander loose harming people. (E.g., psychopaths.)

It even makes sense to have limited expectations of how fair and moral we expect people to be. We and shouldn’t expect people to be as motivated to help others as they are to help themselves and those they love. It’s just not realistic and workable. (On the other hand, of course, that doesn’t justify gross unfairness like a hereditary aristocracy, and the fact that we don’t expect people to freely choose to be moral is precisely why we need laws to keep nepotism, cronyism, and other forms of favoritism from getting out of hand.)

In general, systematic injustices are justified in much the same way that we justify other things that are actually justified, and the patterns of justification are perverted by appeal to spurious “facts”—e.g., the idea that blacks or Jews are intellectually or morally subhuman, untrustworthy, lazy, greedy, or otherwise dangerous or undeserving, and that catering to them as we would to each other would cause great harm in the bigger picture.

Look at the justifications for denying Gays equal marriage rights—they’re immoral, defective, unqualified, and ultimately unsuited to the job of being married partners and especially parents. We have to nip this in the bud for the greater good—to protect straight marriage, to avoid endorsing immorality, to keep kids from being perverted by being raised by perverts, etc. Yes, it’s unfair in some sense, but it’s not our fault that it’s unfair—they’re asking for it, and we can’t help it that they’re unsuitable. And what’s our society coming to? Where will this end. This will destroy everything we hold dear! Think of the children!

Seriously, look at the rationlizations of grotesquely unjust treatment of outgroups, and compare them to the rationales for necessarily different treatment of groups such as dangerous violent criminals, or children and retarded people. They’re basically the same.

What requires such rationales is that everybody knows we’re supposed to care about others, and be concerned with fairness, all other things being equal.

What allows people to use the same rationales in such different cases is precisely the introduction of spurious “facts,” which generally misrepresent the victims as being like criminals and retarded persons and children, to make otherwise obvious injustice seem morally okay—and even necessary, therefore morally good.

As a personal note, I don’t think my theism is in any way a stumbling block in any moral discussions, simply due to the fact that my theological position states that if there really is a morality, we as humans have to be able to figure it out by Christian theology.

What does it mean to “figure it out by Christian theology”, as opposed to just figuring it out?

Sounds like a stumbling block to me, but maybe I’m misunderstanding you.

You can certainly have a Christian theology that acknowledges that the Bible and its teachings are basically irrelevant for morality, and that we have to figure morality out for ourselves, irrespective of what scripture says, in the very same way nontheists would—e.g., by teasing out what we really mean by “moral” in important example cases, deciding whether concern for others well-being is basic, and what does or doesn’t reduce to that.

As soon as you bring “Christian theology” into it, at all, you lose me. Christian theology is chronically screwed up, especially with regard to the most basic moral questions—Divine Command Theory, Free Will of a sort that gets God off the hook for the Problem of Evil but has seriously messed-up ramifications for retributive justice, collective guilt and substitutional punishment for same, moral exemplars who are genocidal maniacs or torture people for honest mistakes forever, slaves being obedient to masters even if they’re assholes, etc., etc., etc.

It’s hard for me to imagine a much worse place to start in figuring out moral issues.

Starting from a Christian tradition, you can decide that Plato was right in the Euthyphro, and that the scriptures are hopelessly inconsistent and often wildly immoral, and then proceed to reason exactly as atheistic philosophers do, by ignoring scripture and Christian tradition. But Christians generally don’t; they generally think that Christianity is special, and special in specifically moral ways, and usually that there’s something importantly Divinely Inspired about at least some scriptures. That guarantees that most will never really get anywhere that isn’t mired in misconceptions and/or appeals to bogus authority, or at the very least that they’ll waste a lot of time messing around with that stuff before they realize it’s actually worse than irrelevant.

It seems kind of bizarre to me that you say

my theological position states that if there really is a morality, we as humans have to be able to figure it out by Christian theology

What kind of theological position says “if there really is a morality…” If?

I’ve read the whole Bible, and I never noticed that if. I’ve also read various theology, including some liberal theology, and I’ve never noticed that if, at least not taken seriously. That there is a morality and that it has something very important to do with God, is generally assumed. (Even in theology where it’s hard to see why they use the word God at all—they’re not talking about a supernatural person, and nothing like any of the concepts of God in the Bible—except perhaps to make it sound religiousy and maybe specially magically/mysteriously moral or morally authoritative.)

I’m curious what you think Christian theology has to contribute to moral discussion, such that you can ever figure out moral issues “by Christian theology,” or anything close to that.

Your entire comment seems to be based around one misunderstanding of my comment. When I said: “that if there really is a morality, we as humans have to be able to figure it out by Christian theology.” what I meant basically was “According to Christian theology, we as humans have to be able to figure out an objective morality — if one exists — without appealing simply to the Word of God.”

As for the “if one exists” part, that’s my being philosophically informed and noting that such a morality may not actually exist, but if one doesn’t then God doesn’t have it either. That part is a bit more controversial, though.

I don’t think there’s anything left of your comment to reply to, but let me know if there is or if you want to talk about what else I said.

I guess I’m not sure what to make of your comment. I think Michael’s quite right that belief in God is a major stumbling block for moral reasoning—it has been a chronic problem in the history of ethics, and it is a big problem right now, for most Christians.

(The fact that some people manage to step over a stumbling block, or manage to step over it sometimes, doesn’t mean that it’s not a stumbling block. A stumbling block is surmountable, unlike, say, a fence or wall.)

For example, the large majority of Christians think that their religion has something important to do with whether gays should allowed to have “marriage” or women should be allowed to have abortions. Even most who are in favor of gay marriage and abortion rights think that, e.g., thinking that the Sermon on the Mount is a more authentic source of morality than Leviticus and Deuteronomy. They’re not giving due weight to the relevant science, e.g., the psychology of sexual preferences and embryology, or to the kind of completely secular moral philosophy that’s really relevant.

Think about the abortion and stem cell research debates. The active opposition to early abortions and embryonic stem cell research is almost entirely grounded in a central tenet of orthodox Christianity—that human beings have human souls, and that those souls are very important, being central to (or even sufficient for) personhood.

There is no way to have that debate sanely without criticizing the claim that that there is such a thing as such a soul, which the science pretty clearly shows there isn’t.

And that’s why we don’t. We never ever have a big, popular discussion of what really constitutes personhood, and the relationship between personhood and having rights or any moral interests.

We simply can’t discuss what’s really morally important, because it would involve telling the majority that their religion is basically wrong—that no, they pretty clearly don’t have traditioinal substance dualistic souls, and a zygote or blastocyst is simply not a person at all. It’s nothing like a person in any way that matters, and we should move on to discussing something real that really does matter.

Even theologically heterodox religious political liberals aren’t much help in getting the discourse onto a sane track. Most of them believe in substance dualistic souls, too, and most of the ones that don’t still believe in a vague supernaturalish soulish something extra with unclear implications for personhood and rights.

Those people are not going to turn to the orthodox people and tell them they’re just scientifically wrong, and should go read up on embryology and philosophy of mind, and read atheistic philosophers like Peter Singer on abortion. They’re more likely to make unconvincing arguments about how a woman’s right to control her own body is absolute, even to the point of allowing her to kill a human being with human rights who is dependent on her through no fault of its own—and to point out that the Bible doesn’t have any injunctions against abortion to prove them wrong about that.

It’s no surprise to me that religiously orthodox people often react quite negatively to such things, and view such reasoning as monstrous; if I believed that a zygote was an actual human being, and that rights were something absolute that you got automatically by being a human being in that sense, I’d think that too.

We are not anywhere close to being able to have a rational political discourse about such things, and religious liberals are largely at fault; they drop the ball because they believe many of the same problematic basic things that the more orthodox believers do, and can’t effectively refute them.

Much of these discussions seem to hinge on the need to establish absolutes. But we don’t get absolutes. We get probabilities, negotiations, incremental advances, and hard won gains. The lack of absolutes is not the same as relativism, it just means more work, Human beings are indeed crooked timber, but religion is also built out of crooked timber; it is an attempt to project our opinions onto the stars and claim them as absolutes. The mere claim that it furnishes absolutes does not make them absolutes. There is a small matter of the truth. Some who argue from a religious standpoint will make valid moral arguments, and some will call for the death of millions. Does the delusion of divine sponsorship make a Bin Laden right? If you are going to ‘problemetize’ atheist ethics, at least be honest enough to do the same for theistic ethics. There is plenty to ‘problematize’ there.Concerning the existentialists, their premise was that existence precedes essence. They took as a central dogma that there is no such thing as human nature, which I think has been adequately debunked–if there is one thing that the evolutionary psychologists have achieved, it is this. Furthermore, I hear refrains of Kant’s claim that if you like doing what is right, it isn’t really right. This is a Lutheran prejudice that Kant maintained; apparently he wasn’t entirely awakened from his dogmatic slumber. If you are overwhelmed by ecstatic joy in helping your fellow human beings, this does not make behaving ethically in any way less ethical. I am surprised that this still comes up, because I don’t find it at all relevant. The only stipulation in ethical behaviour is that one should not elevate ones own comfort and advantage over the genuine needs of others. If doing what is right makes you happy, then I applaud you.On the topic of empathy, the fact that some people are born without empathy does not make us unable to make ethical judgments, any more than the fact that some people are born without legs makes us all unable to walk. So let us dispense with the arguments from the existence of cripples. Furthermore, while some may indeed avoid ethical behaviour out of short term emotional dispositions, impulsiveness has indeed been long identified as a impediment to moral maturity. But as much as a parent may not enjoy applying stinging disinfectant to a child’s cuts, he or she will prefer this to the possibility of gangrene. Ethics begins with empathy, but does not end there–it is mediated by knowledge, culture, experience, and reason. The lack of any of these can also impair moral judgment.

There’s a lot to talk about in your comment, but your comment seems to be a bit scattershot to me, so I’m going to try to pick out themes to talk about, and if I end up missing or misstating something, let me know.

1) I find it odd to suggest that theism is a “stumbling block” in any way because for the most part most of the people discussing it have been theists. Some — like Aristotle, I believe — have used explicit reference to god or gods, and some haven’t. Yet many of the insights in modern-way non-religious moral philosophy have been derived from arguments from those theists. It strikes me as unreasonable to say that that’s them “overcoming” their theism, as it’s more likely that it was just not relevant or was accomodated. In fact, theistic belief is, generally, easier to accomodate than other agreements because of the idea that God really wants us to do what’s right, and so often theists — even ones who advocate for a religious ethical view — can put God aside and focus on the fundamental philosophical differences, like when and why you should say that something is a person, or if the right to bodily autonomy trumps the right to life in the case of a pregnancy.

2) Michael De Dora argued that theism was a stumbling block and that theism had to be dealt with on the basis of one argument that is not popular in moral philosophy — even the religious kind — and is usually advanced as a response to a specific claim. The whole debate is over whether religious morals are humanistic or humanist values are religious in origin when they mostly agree. Both sides often want to claim that the origin of the ideas are religious or humanistic, but for the most part this is irrelevant to most discussions of morality, including the ones you advanced here. So his argument does not in any way support the contention that theism is a stumbling block and so needs to be dealt with first, as that argument is not one commonly discussed when trying to determine what is or isn’t right.

3) When talking about morality and the history of ethics, appealing to common belief isn’t exactly reasonable; you have to look at what’s happening at the level of people who are actually really looking into it. So not “folk ethics”, but “philosophical ethics”. As said in 1), there’s no reason to think that at that level religion is an interesting stumbling block; it doesn’t seem to matter nor do the practitioners think it is. And many religions — Catholicism, Anglicanism (I think) and Judaism — have, in fact, formal bodies doing ethics at that level, and their contributions do seem to count as reasonable takes on the matter that are due consideration. Again, there is no evidence that when it matters, theism is a stumbling block.

4) Now, a lot of your post focuses on how theists can’t get past what they believe about morality and the world and so can’t get that completely secular morality that you claim is the relevant one, or about those scientific facts that you think so determinate. And in a sense, this is absolutely true. But it’s an irrelevant sense, because all it means is that they disagree with you. And disagreement does not deserve to be taken as a “stumbling block”; it is something that needs to be addressed, but both sides have an obligation to present their cases and argue for them successfully. And it certainly applies to other views as well. For example, Russell Blackford recently argued that abortion should be allowed because we feel sympathy for the mother but don’t (or shouldn’t) for the foetus. Being Stoic-leaning, I disagree that sympathy matters at all, and in fact have reason to find such a view heinous. Should I call Blackford’s sympathy and view on that a “stumbling block” for him? No. It’s a disagreement in principle. Yes, we have to address it, but I don’t think it’s obvious that he’s wrong and I’m right, or vice versa. The same applies to much of the theistic issues you raise.

5) So, some religious liberals don’t reject theistic beliefs, but instead argue for the rightness of a position using those beliefs as a foundation. Well, since they share those religous beliefs, that seems like a reasonable way to go, and might actually work. As an example, remember Ophelia’s earlier posts about Conte and that abortion case in Phoenix? Being sympathetic to an idea that you are not allowed morally to kill someone to save someone else’s life, I couldn’t reject it flat-out. Instead, on my blog, I argued that in the case where both will die the person who will die regardless is obligated to sacrifice their life for the one who has a chance. This must be compatible with at least Christian theology or risk making Jesus’ sacrfice immoral. Since the foetus cannot make moral decisions for themselves, those appointed to do so must choose … but then must choose the sacrifice, and so the Bishop’s — and by extension, perhaps, the Church’s — position is wrong by their own morality. This is likely more effective than battering away at base principles that are very difficult to change.

And finally, briefly, substance dualism has yet to be disproved by science — and I am quite well-versed in philosophy of mind, thank you — Singer’s arguments are not as strong as you think (I have come across them), science’s contributions to the abortion debate are always open to the question of, say, why we should let “They can suffer” determine personhood (so we need to do philosophy on that), and the bodily autonomy argument is one I’ve heard more from atheists than theists, for good reason since in most theistic views bodily autonomy cannot trump the right to life.

I’m guessing you’re talking a lot about me, but it isn’t clear since some of the things you mention are not things I said. So I’ll point out the ones that do address what I said (or at least believe):

“, I hear refrains of Kant’s claim that if you like doing what is right, it isn’t really right. This is a Lutheran prejudice that Kant maintained; apparently he wasn’t entirely awakened from his dogmatic slumber. If you are overwhelmed by ecstatic joy in helping your fellow human beings, this does not make behaving ethically in any way less ethical.”

If you act morally and it happens to make you ecstatically happy, then that’s fine. My argument was the other way around, in that you just happen to like doing things that are moral regardless of whether you even recognize that it’s moral. As an example, if someone had no trouble morally with rape but didn’t want to do it because they found skin contact disgusting, they clearly would not be moral. In order to be moral, you have to want to do something and be motivated to do or not do that simply because of its moral value, and not due to any other value. Thus, as I said, the true test of morality is if you are willing to do something that by every non-moral desire you have you desperately don’t want to do but your desire to be moral says you should. Note that the exception to this is if you delberately make your desires moral by conditioning them to what is indeed moral. But if you can go about your life just doing what you want without thinking about the moral, and it just happens to be the case that your desires align with the moral, I do think it reasonable to question how moral you really would be.

” The only stipulation in ethical behaviour is that one should not elevate ones own comfort and advantage over the genuine needs of others.”

Why? Egoism posits just that and is a valid moral theory, if an unpopular one. I don’t agree with it myself, but cannot just dismiss it out of hand.

“On the topic of empathy, the fact that some people are born without empathy does not make us unable to make ethical judgments, any more than the fact that some people are born without legs makes us all unable to walk.”

Autistics seem to lack empathy but do not seem particularly impaired in moral judgement, and psychopaths actually seem to have better “rational empathy” than autistics and are amoral. That’s the point: not having empathy does not seem to reflect bad moral reasoning, so why should we think that empathy itself is, in fact, a key or useful component in morality? Yes, empathy may be important in the moral determinations we currently make, but that does not make that correct or the only option.

“Ethics begins with empathy …”

I disagree strongly with that, as would the Stoics, Kant, Aristotle and many others. You cannot simply assume that your position is the correct one.

I think you have a stumbling block in the way of understanding what others mean by “stumbling block.”

If you think a “disagreement on principle” is ipso facto not a stumbling block, you’re seriously not getting it.

For example, if Catholics think there’s an immortal human soul implanted in a zygote at the “moment” of conception, and that the soul is the person, that’s an enormous stumbling block in discussing the significance of an early abortion.

The fact that science hasn’t strictly disproven the substance dualism doesn’t change that; science isn’t generally in the business of strict disproofs anyway. If you’re allowed to fudge all the background assumptions and posit saving complexities that avoid falsification in an unconstrained way, science can’t disprove much of anything anyhow.

(We didn’t even disprove geocentricism—you can always introduce relativizing axioms for celestial mechanics that would make geocentricism compatible with the observations.)

People clinging to apparently false hypotheses by making them unfalsifiable is generally a “stumbling block,” to say the least. If anything, calling it a “stumbling block” is understatement.

You mentioned formal bodies like the Catholics’ doing ethical philosophy at the non-folk level.

Are you serious? Have you read Theology of the Body? Do you really think such groups are going to come out and say the Pope simply got it basically wrong, and straighten it all out?

They’re not. That’s a stumbling block if ever I saw one.

Now suppose that the Pope is right that God exists and puts a soul in every zygote, and that the soul is a full-blown human person in moral terms, and that God has a plan for your penis and other people’s anuses, and putting the one in the other is not part of that plan, hence morally wrong.

If those sorts of things are true, then most of us here have some really big stumbling blocks keeping us from understanding moral truth.

No, I can’t prove you don’t have an immortal soul, although I can argue pretty well that it’s unlikely. And I can’t prove that there’s no God and no Divine Plan for my penis.

You mentioned the question of whether it’s right to kill a fetus to save the mother, when the fetus is going to die either way, and the mother will die if you don’t.

Then you brought Jesus into it.

That’s a stumbling block.

Jesus has nothing to do with it. The whole Jesus myth makes no sense. We aren’t talking about substitutional sacrifice—scapegoating—as in the Jesus story. Jesus is a distraction, and for the death of Jesus to be a useful thing to compare to, we’d have to and understand it, and agree on what it meant.

If Christians try to understand abortion in terms of Jesus’s sacrifice, that brings up a host of possible analogies and clear disanalogies. (For example, in the Jesus myth, Jesus supposedly volunteered to be sacrificed; a fetus can’t.) It just muddies the waters.

It also illustrates the kind of thing I’m talking about: if Christians think that the sacrifice of Jesus is a paradigmatically good example of somebody dying for somebody else, they really need to rethink basic ethics, and not drag that horrendously screwed-up example into a serious discussion as a paradigm of getting it right.

The Jesus story is morally retarded. If Christians are still using it as a paradigm of righteousness when discussing real issues, like life-saving medical abortions, something is profoundly wrong, and if we keep taking that sort of crazy-ass barbaric thing for granted, maybe it’s not a stumbling block, but an insurmountable barrier.

Why do you insist we need to try to ground our morals in absolutes? Why can’t we be trying to always do better with the understanding we are not perfect? Scientists are perfectly happy with a level of uncertainty. It is the theists that demand absolutes.

When I think of stumbling block, I think of “obstacle that must be overcome” all right, but that seems to mostly apply to things that aren’t relevant to the discussion or that are obviously wrong. Most people do not really consider their opponents’ actual relevant positions as “stumbling blocks”, and to call them such strikes me as arrogant, since it implies that all they need to do is abandon their positions and they’ll come to the right position, which is yours. I’m also not sure that that is how Michael De Dora meant it. Anyway, I don’t think it is as obvious as you think that your interpretation of the term is what the general interpretation is, and I also say that if that’s what you mean by stumbling block then classifying it as such is something that I have no reason to care at all about.

Onto my argument, you miss the point. I presume that in the case of the bishop, what you ultimately want is to get them to stop enforcing what you think is a morally inferior position and start enforcing the morally superior one. Well, so do I. But instead of insisting at battering away at fundamental principles like the belief in God that may not change their position, I try to see if their own position supports the contention. So, I start from “You cannot directly take the life of someone to save someone else” since that is relevant, independent of God (you can believe that with or without the belief that morals are God-given) and one that I’m sympathetic to. Accepting that, I argued on the basis of what a person should do if no matter what they’ll die but if they die earlier they’ll save the other person’s life. I argue that they should sacrifice themselves. I also argued — since, again, I’m arguing inside the Christian viewpoint for the sake of argument — that this cannot be denied by Christians or else one of their own fundmental events might be declared immoral. Basically, in order to affect a change in atttitude I do so by taking their views seriously and demonstrating what their views say about that.

I see nothing wrong with this when we cannot settle the fundamental moral principles, and see it as likely being far more effective than attacking the base principles. You seem to deny this rather heatedly, but I fail to see why other than that you don’t like their base principles. Fair enough, but that’s not going to get you what you want and also isn’t intellectually valid; you cannot simply dismiss their principles until you can disprove them. And that actually would require the stronger stance than science takes to proof, since that’s a philosophical debate.

Thus, as I said, the true test of morality is if you are willing to do something that by every non-moral desire you have you desperately don’t want to do but your desire to be moral says you should.

But your desire to be moral is a desire, not a formal principle. I am not saying that empathy is the stated basis of formal systems, nearly all of which are intended to convince the immoral, specifically those who do not share this desire, and therefore cannot appeal to the desire itself. My point is that the concern for morality has an instinctive root in normal human beings, not one that arises from religious upbringing. We care deeply about it, regardless of our philosophical roots, which is why this discussion has been one of the longest I’ve ever seen on B&W. Formal systems are not the root, they are the outcome of this desire.

By the way, autistics towards the extreme end of the spectrum are morally impaired: severely autistic adults have to be institutionalized because they pose a violent physical threat to their families. And there rational empathy is an oxymoron; sociopaths learn techniques for fooling and manipulating people, which is why sensitivity training makes them worse rather than better. But their best defense is the expectation of normalcy. Since sociopaths are rare, they take us by surprise. Our standard theory of mind does not work on them. This is why the Big Lie works. It is hard for most people to believe that someone could be so ruthlessly dishonest. Extreme sociopaths are almost as crippled as severe autistics, and simply end up spending nearly all of their lives in prison.

Why do you insist we need to try to ground our morals in absolutes? Why can’t we be trying to always do better with the understanding we are not perfect? Scientists are perfectly happy with a level of uncertainty. It is the theists that demand absolutes.

I am doing precisely the opposite, I am insisting that we do not try to ground our morals in absolutes, because it is futile, elusive, delusional and unnecessary. So we agree. When you say that theists are demanding absolutes, I say ‘Yeah!’, but I will add that many atheists do the same. It’s awful tempting, and I think all of us, for more or less of our lives, yearn for moral certainties. But if we are committed to skepticism and naturalism, then we must accept that moral absolutes are unattainable.

It’s unclear to me what atheists you’re talking about, and what you mean by moral “absolutes.”

I am referring to atheists that say the promotion and maintenance well-being is the prime basis for morality, or that morality is based on the evolutionary development of empathy. I do not deny that well-being is a common end to which we aim, or that empathy plays a role in shaping our moralities, but to suggest that these are the ‘true’, ‘absolute’, or ‘objective’ bases for morality is a to have a narrow scope of what forms and purposes morality can take. What I mean by moral absolutes are morals that we can be certain of, that we know that some behaviors are unequivocally ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. I quoted Graham Martin-Royle up above when he said “People should do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do,” as evidence of this moral absolutist thinking. If Graham is not an atheist / agnostic, then I apologize for assuming so, but there are atheists who expound similar moral absolutist views, as if to be certain about one’s morality is the one thing they are unwilling to bury with the death of God.

Andrew Lovely, I think you are misunderstanding “People should do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do” which is not absolutist thinking but a playful way of saying that morality is something that comes to us naturally. None of us consult a book of morality or divine laws in deciding what is moral; we just do what feels right.

Ah morality serves a function for interpersonal relations (survival, order) – so perhaps it was aided our species with survival and procreation. Perhaps individuals who had the brain hardware to facilitate morality were more likely to survive and procreate. Perhaps as a species, we are morally expectant. This all seems reasonable and likely to me. That still does not offer us any certainty about what behaviors are right or wrong to do. Human intuition, as you seem to consider a signifier of what is right or wrong, is still wholly subjective. Any two people’s intuitions are likely to contradict. I believe culture shapes our intuitions more than we may realize. When we are socialized as infants, toddlers, and young children, we learn from our parents whether to associate certain behaviors with pleasure or pain. Eventually those associations become deeply engrained to the point that we cannot imagine any other way to feel about those things. If nearly everyone we know responds physically and psychologically the same to certain behaviors, I am skeptical that reflects a species-wide quality so much as a culturally-borne one.

Oh yes, I agree that culture shapes what we consider moral. I can’t really see morality as being anything other than a part of us that develops from our biology as we go, thus largely cultural but also incidental; we collect the memes and on the way experience the gamut of human emotions/feelings that also shape our morality, and all these things are of course dependent on the quality of the bodies we start out with which are on average very similar and so you get a lot of people with very similar morals within the same cultural milieu. People responding the same (but not to the same degree) to certain behaviors is to be expected.

I’m not one to argue for universal morality, although I do think we have good reasons to elevate some morals to something close to universal status. I also think “we do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do” does not imply a universal morality and so leaves room for people to have different morals.

I’m in near full agreement with you! For pragmatic purposes, elevating “some morals to something close to universal status” is reasonable. If we can achieve a consensus on what ‘end’ our social behavior should aim for, then there’s no good reason not to deliberate the best ways to achieve that end and hold each other to a standard. The phrase “People should do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do” is still bothersome for me, because it implies there is a “right thing to do”. The concept is a fiction, although admittedly a useful fiction.. Did I just say that, “a useful fiction”? Whoaaaa haha

Onto my argument, you miss the point. I presume that in the case of the bishop, what you ultimately want is to get them to stop enforcing what you think is a morally inferior position and start enforcing the morally superior one. Well, so do I. But instead of insisting at battering away at fundamental principles like the belief in God that may not change their position, I try to see if their own position supports the contention.

I think you’ve missed a very two basic points:

(1) This isn’t an accommodationist blog, it’s a gnu atheist blog. We’re not just interested in getting some Bishop to change his mind about one particular policy choice, to save some particular womens’ lives, although that’s a fine thing, too. It’s great if you can get some people to not kill some other people sometimes, even if you can’t change their minds about anything more basic. But we do want to change people’s minds about more basic things—theism, Divine Command Theory—which have many ramifications way beyond a particular Bishop’s policy on a particular thing, and we’re pretty sure they’re wrong about those things and we will talk accordingly.

If it bothers you that we’re “arrogant” enough to see other people’s religious views as false, and as stumbling blocks, and speak our minds in those terms, you’re really hanging out at the wrong blog.

You saying that sort of thing is like going to Orac’s blog and talking about his “arrogance” in calling people’s belief in vitalism a “stumbling block” to delivering effective medicine, because quack treatments sound scientific to vitalists.

You may call it arrogance, but we call it talking about what’s true, and not being sidetracked by pretending to respect beliefs that we think aren’t live options.

I’m not going to accommodate your views. I’m going to tell you I think you’re wrong, and speak as if you’re wrong, and if you want to disagree, go ahead, but the accusation of “arrogance” from a theist cuts no more ice with me than from a vitalist, or an astrologist, or a tinfoil hat conspiracy theorist.

I respect your right to your different views, but I don’t respect your views any more than any other views I consider well-refuted crank nonsense. The fact that you don’t see it that way is not my problem, here. It’s yours.

You’re the odd man out here, and that’s the just the way it works. When you’re in the minority, where people are pretty sure that they have very good reason to think you’re wrong, you can’t expect the kind of deference to your views that you can expect in a larger context where you’re in the majority, or people don’t think they have a good handle on the issues.

I am especially not going to defer to your views—yours personally—because I know you’ve been hanging out here long enough that you should know how it works here, and why. You know this is a gnu atheist blog. You know that the consensus here is that theism and substance dualism and especially orthodox Christianity are, on informed reflection, pretty silly stuff, and not particularly worth taking into account except as a stumbling block that other people face.

The last thing we’re going to do is agree with you that theism and substance dualism and orthodox Christianity shouldn’t be called stumbling blocks. If you raise the issue, we’ll just explain why they are in fact precisely that, and that in fact it’s an understatement.

(2) Michael was talking about religious belief as a continuing source of problems in discussing morality, fairly generally, in a context of a Rabbi saying that atheists have no grounds for being moral at all, and crap like that.

We weren’t talking about a particular policy issue where your favored short-term, accommodationist tactics were particularly relevant. We were talking about a very general, long-term problem of how to talk about morality in our theism-sodden culture, where many people think the Rabbi is right that morality comes from God and that that’s terribly important in a way that makes atheists unqualified to talk about morality.

:) I’m not actually sure why it is funny to you, but to me it is funny how it can be applied to an untold number of things humans believe in and do, even language itself. Of course, we can easily say that now with the theory of evolution solidly in our grasp. So many things that seemed essential about reality to our ancestors are really evolutionary flukes.

One more about “we do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do“: Part of the cleverness of it could be how it renders “the right thing” into a useful fiction like you say, negating the meaning of “the right thing” and turning it into little more than the Nike™ slogan. Or, it could be a Yogi Berra-ism.

If you may, I ask that if you choose to respond to this that you do not write a book, or else I’ll be disinclined to read it.

The last thing we’re going to do is agree with you that theism and substance dualism and orthodox Christianity shouldn’t be called stumbling blocks. If you raise the issue, we’ll just explain why they are in fact precisely that, and that in fact it’s an understatement.

Stumbling blocks to what, I ask? Some Atheistic Utopia? So people abandon belief in God and substance dualism and suddenly the world would be paradise? Suddenly ex-theists and ex-dualists achieve a life of fulfillment, clarity, and contentment?

It often seems to me that gnu atheists are generally attacking the wrong things, and have become notably quixotic about the effect their simple goals of reducing religiosity and theism would have on society. I am not so sure that cause & effect analysis (religion is popular = backwardness, destituteness, and danger) and (atheism is popular = progress, fulfillment, vivaciousness) works in the way it is presented by some.

How does the simple belief in god or in a soul have negative psycho-social outcomes? Are those kinds of beliefs the kind of which we should be directing our criticisms and outrage? I think not. As Thomas Jefferson wrote over 2 centuries ago, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” . I think Jefferson had it right. There are more dangerous monsters to combat. In his book, Atheist Spirituality, Andre-Comte Sponville goes to suggest that it is not religion per se that is bothersome. It is dogma, obscurantism, and anti-intellectualism that atheists should be most concerned with. And with any honest analysis of the varieties of religious experiences, we’ll notice that not all religions involve dogma, obscurantism, and anti-intellectualism. Not only that, many religions encourage and foster humanist values / actions, so really… what is there to have qualms with there? Must we be so adamant about creating an atheistic utopia? Gnu atheists have been accused of this time and time again, for legitimate reasons, that they are attacking a caricature of religion, or generalizing the most extreme manifestations of it. When will atheists in general be willing to move past that?

What objective morality? Religion, even narrowed to the confines of Judaism and Christianity, can’t even agree on the morality of the bacon cheeseburger.

Jews: No bacon, no cheese.

Catholics: It’s OK, except on Fridays during Lent (or all Fridays for some of the old-time hard-core).

Most Protestants: All OK, all the time.

7th Day Adventists: No bacon, no burger; only cheese.

And if we move beyond the “Judeo-Christian” ethos (which frankly never existed because the Gentiles explicitly rejected much of Jewish moral codes):

Are Muslims OK with mixing meat and milk? If so, that’s another opinion. Cheeseburger OK, hold the bacon.

Hindi: No beef, but is pork OK? Grilled cheese with bacon.

And on and on. There are as many opinions about the bacon cheeseburger as there are religions. What the heck is “objective” about any of that?

When religion can agree on the morality of eating a bacon cheeseburger, the wearing of hats, and the status of the male foreskin, then I will start listening to religion on other matters of morality. I’m not holding my breath.

Stumbling blocks to what, I ask? Some Atheistic Utopia? So people abandon belief in God and substance dualism and suddenly the world would be paradise? Suddenly ex-theists and ex-dualists achieve a life of fulfillment, clarity, and contentment?

I do wonder sometimes if you’ve read any books on what you pontificate about, besides existentialism. You seem to think you have all the answers, and not to understand what other people are actually talking about—e.g., what they already know and agree with about what you’re preaching, and why they disagree on some things, and what they mean by various words like “realism.”

I don’t know if I can discuss those things with you without “writing a book” if you don’t show that it’s not necessary. You’re fond of terse pontifications that seem to indicate that you literally don’t know what you’re talking about.

Well judging my intelligence and credibility is one adequate way to address the points I made. Thanks! It’s not the first time that my arguments have been completely disregarded here due to my age or my dissension! I do apologize if you found my ‘please do not write a book’ request offensive – I just noticed that it takes 10-15minutes to read each of your responses, and I thought it was generally possible to be more parsimonious. Can we stick to the topic at hand rather than attacking each other?

The notion of the “atheistic utopia” is a serious one, and I based it off of the tendency for some atheists to say things like “the world would be a better place without religion (or theism)” or “religion is the root of all evil”, “religion is oppressive and backwards”; all such statements about religion (or theism) imply that without it, we would be far better off… as if almost magically. The notion of the “atheistic utopia” was not meant to be a strawman, nor do I think it is. It is a concept that seems implicated by many things some atheists will say. Especially those who dedicate virtually all their criticism toward religion or theism in toto.

Paul W #73

I do understand what people mean when they talk of moral realism. I am arguing against moral realism. I think that the kind of skepticism that is exalted among atheists must apply to morality as well, and the effect of that would be arriving at a moral skepticism or moral nihilism. When fellow atheists speak of certain behaviors as inherently right or wrong, without the nuance that their moral judgment is wholly subjective, that to me is evidence of an unfounded commitment to moral realism.

If you think that was uncalled for, I think that demonstrates what I’m talking about.

Knowingly or not, you were appealing to a common accommodationist trope about the New Atheists, that they’re utopians who think that if we just got rid of religion, everything would automatically be hunky-dory and paradaisical. They are obviously naive and simplistic and wrong, and non-gnus smugly know better.

Dawkins and Harris are incessantly accused of that, despite their consistent disclaimers that they do not think that—that they think that religion is by and large a bad thing, but that if we got rid of religion, life would still be difficult and conflict-ridden, and there would be plenty of work to do.

Lately, there’s been a lot of discussion, in the atheist blogosphere in general, and here in particular, about the nature of ethics, “moral realism,” and what it does or doesn’t mean for morality to be “objective,” and so on.

Like a typical gnu-basher, you comment about how those absolutists are clueless, morality is wholly subjective, and so on, without understanding that those terms are ambiguous, and that most serious philosophers of any metaethical stripe would agree with you on one interpretation, and disagree on another.

You need to be clearer. To the extent that I’m charitable in interpreting what you say, I don’t think you’re saying anything that most of us—either the ones who are serious about metaethics, or random gnus—don’t already know. To the extent that I try to interpret your pithy statements (e.g., about absolutism) more strongly, such that they’re interesting, I think they’re partly wrong. It’s just not as simple as you make it out to be, and a lot of people you seem to be criticizing are not wrong, or not as wrong as you think they are.

Most of us don’t think that morality is “objective” in the sense that it will motivate sociopaths, or motivate people who are just very selfish more than a little bit. (It’s not Objectively Prescriptive in J. L. Mackie’s sense. We all know that.) Most of us are also “relativists” in a particular sense—what actually morally motivates people depends on their actual values, and there’s variation in that.

Still, most of us are not strongly cultural relativists, in a sense you can easily be interpreted as being, because we don’t think that basic moral values generally vary that much between cultures, and do think that basic moral values are partly innate, for most people, though there’s biological variation. (That’s a bit of an oversimplification, but its the basic idea.)

Some of us are “moral realists” in a particular sense that does not conflict with that kind of “relativism.” We think that there’s a peculiar “natural kind” of biologically normal morality, which most people (cross-culturally) share the rudiments of, for largely “biological” reasons, and which would lead to considerable moral convergence in rational reflection—i.e., that most people from most cultures would, for reasons that are not arbitrarily imposed by culture, converge to roughly similar moral schemes, in light of all the relevant facts, if they work things through rationally. They’d recognize a lot of “moral values” from their own cultures as propped up by falsehoods, and not stuff they’d still care about after they learn the truth and mull it over enough. (E.g., homophobia and racism and various kinds of xenophobia are typically supported by misconceptions about The Other.)

That kind of belief in natural moral convergence (on informed reflection) doesn’t have to be called moral realism. People who believe in the same sort of thing can call themselves relativists instead, to emphasize that it’s not Objectively Prescriptive, but it’s different from strong cultural relativism, that says that values are mere cultural constructs, with no special or basic cross-cultural principles, and could go pretty much anywhere on reformed reflection, depending on what cultural basis you start from.

You can also believe in a certain important kind of convergent morality (on informed reflection) and still call yourself an Error Theorist or nihilist. You can believe that yes, people do tend to converge on certain basic values once they discard stuff that their culture imposes on them because it doesn’t make sense to them on reformed reflection, but not call the enduring preferences “moral” and especially not “objectively moral,” and you can claim that our ordinarily language of “morality” and “right” and “wrong” is a poor fit for the kinds of preferences and principles that do survive in informed reflection.

The upshot of that is that a lot of people are talking about pretty much the same thing—a somewhat subtle thing—in terms of different simplistic categories, like “relativism” and “absolutism” or “realism” and “fictionalism.” They may agree that theres something real and interesting going on, that has a paticular kind of structure and regularity to it—what I’m calling rationally convergent morality—but disagree as to how to apply simplistic terms like “real” and “objective” and “moral”.

It’s also complicated in that people of any metaethical stripe—“realists,” “relativists” and “error theorists” may disagree on how convergent that kind of rationally convergent morality is. It may converge interestingly once you toss out various cultural bullshit, but still leave a whole lot of variation in various dimensions.

You seem to be stuck in terminology from the 1950s, which doesn’t distinguish any of those things. It sounds like–and I’m not saying it’s true, just what it sounds like—that you think its a simple matter of absolutism vs. relativism, and you’re telling us which one is right, and calling the “absolutists” stupid.

I honestly don’t know whether you’d call me an absolutist if you understood what I was saying. I’m clearly an absolutist in a weak sense and a relativist in different weak sense—I think that a lot of moral disagreement is based on error, and people could reach more moral agreement in informed reflection, but I don’t think they’d converge entirely, or that everything would be cut and dried and moral controversy would cease to exist.

The notion of the “atheistic utopia” is a serious one, and I based it off of the tendency for some atheists to say things like “the world would be a better place without religion (or theism)”

No doubt you did, and that will be why Paul called it a gnu-bashing canard. I’m not some atheists, and neither is Paul. Here’s a news flash: we don’t like being addressed as generic Bad noo atheists. (By “we” I mean most of the people who read and comment here.)

This basing wild and malicious generalizations on a preconceived notion of what “some atheists” say is precisely what we are so fucking sick of, given that we get it several times a week, sometimes even in reputable outlets like the CHE. If you can’t even figure that out, you’re not a very good interlocutor.

Well judging my intelligence and credibility is one adequate way to address the points I made. Thanks! It’s not the first time that my arguments have been completely disregarded here due to my age or my dissension!

I don’t think that you’re unintelligent, and I’ts not your dissension per se that I care about—and I think it’s a bit of a cop out for you to assume that. If you actually read that admittedly long and somewhat repetitive thread, you’d realize that I can carry on perfectly civil discussions with people I disagree with—e.g., Russell Blackford and J. Jeffers, who are error both theorists—if they’re serious about the subject, rather than just tersely pontificating. (I ended up corresponding with both in email, and getting very positive responses, including on Russells’s blog. Not that we agree on everything, but we did come to realize that we already agree on many things, and our obvious differences are partly terminological.)

I don’t dismiss you because of your age, either. I give you a little slack for that. I don’t really expect you to have read Mackie and Joyce and Harman, or even Harris, much less Putnam, before you go off pontificating about those naive absolutists and moral realists—but I’m not going to let you get away with simplistic dissing of “absolutists” or “realists” to my face, without pointing that it’s a little more complicated than you’re letting on, and a that a lot of people’s views are subtler than you seem to think.

I do apologize if you found my ‘please do not write a book’ request offensive – I just noticed that it takes 10-15minutes to read each of your responses, and I thought it was generally possible to be more parsimonious. Can we stick to the topic at hand rather than attacking each other?

We’ll see. I can’t write briefly, or as tersely as you, if you oversimplify a complex and important subject, and I want to address what I think are the real issues.

I based it off of the tendency for some atheists to say things like “the world would be a better place without religion (or theism)” or “religion is the root of all evil”… [emphasis added]

On page 1 of The GOD Delusion, Dawkins writes:

In January 2006 I presented a two-part television documentary on British television (Channel Four) called Root of All Evil? From the start, I didn’t like the title. Religion is not the root of all evil, for no one thing is the root of all anything.

I have to agree with the others that no one in the gnu camp thinks that there would be an atheist utopia if people were to abandon religion and religious thinking. However, what if Catholicism was like a football team and its fans (for example, not the basis for the way a citizen or legislator votes)? One could argue that for many Catholics, it already is that way to a large extent, but I’m sure you can see how things might get better if more believers looked at their religion as a form of entertainment or tradition and, realizing it has no more basis in reality than a widely popular football team, not something necessary for their lives or the lives of others and not something one can honestly use to justify the mistreatment of others.

The notion of the “atheistic utopia” is a serious one, and I based it off of the tendency for some atheists to say things like “the world would be a better place without religion (or theism)”

Wait.. thinking that things would be better is the same thing as thinking they would be Utopian?

That’s exactly the canard I’m talking about—thanks for demonstrating your accommodatinist patellar reflex for us, right out of the starting gate.

What a load of bollocks. I’m pretty sure that nobody here thinks that human nature is an unalloyed delight, and that everything would be peaches and cream, but for religion.

We’re sick unto death of making a variety of fairly subtle arguments with multiple lines of evidence as to why we think religion is on the whole, at the bottom line, a net negative, only to be told that we think that religion is the only obstacle to universal bliss.

Get this straight: WE DONT BELIEVE IN AN ATHEIST UTOPIA. NOT EVEN CLOSE. WE SAY SO ALL THE TIME. STOP LYING ABOUT WHAT WE’RE SAYING.

or “religion is the root of all evil”,

The only prominent Gnu I know who thats been attributed to is Dawkins, and he has disavowed it—he’s made it quite clear that he doesn’t think it’s true, or even close.

It was the provocative title of his british TV miniseries—but with a question mark that you conveniently omit.

Dawkins has said that he did not choose the title, in fact objected to it, and that he wished they didn’t title the show that, and that he regrets not having fought it harder.

And I don’t know a single atheist who seriously thinks that religion is the root of all evil. Not one. I don’t even know a single atheist, to my knowledge, who thinks that religion is the #1 source of evil in the world.

Pretty much every atheist I know seems to think that selfishnessness, general ignorance, and general stupidity all rate ahead of religion per se, although religion provides good examples of the latter two.

In most of our views, religion is far from the root of all evil—it’s not even the second or third greatest cause of evil. We do think that on the whole, it is a significant problem worth doing something about, which is a very different thing.

STOP TELLING US WE THINK RELIGION IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL. WE DON’T THINK THAT, AND NEVER HAVE, AND HAVE SAID SO MANY TIMES.

“religion is oppressive and backwards”; all such statements about religion (or theism) imply that without it, we would be far better off… as if almost magically.

Hyeesh. I just don’t know what that even means. I do think that on the whole, religion is oppressive and backwards.

Human nature may often be oppressive and backwards, with or without religion, but religion frequently helps with oppressiveness and backwardness.

Seriously, where do you think the opposition to fetal stem cell research comes from? Or the opposition to even very early abortion, of fetuses with no nervous systems?

Who do you think is preventing the distribution of condoms in AIDS-ridden subsaharan Africa, such that tens of mllions of unnecessary deaths, and uncountable orphanings, will inevitably happen. Who is it that tells Africans in the midst of an AIDS epidemic that condoms are immoral and don’t work? (Hint: I don’t think it’s Richard Dawkins or PZ Myers.) Who is it that prevents condom distribution from being funded with international aid funds?

Seriously, Andrew. We’re talking about many many millions of people dying. It’s happening right now, and you don’t seem to think it’s a big issue.

Oh, and that reminds me of some dead friends of mine—gay men who contracted HIV while Reagan stalled about addressing the gay plague. Who do you think Reagan was trying not to offend by taking fags’ welfare seriously? Who do you think was saying that he shouldn’t, because it was a curse from God?

I’m not talking about things getting better as if magically. A lot of the effects of religion are quite obvious—its not like the Catholic Church and various fundamentalist organizations don’t themselves brag about their effectiveness at stopping the distribution of condoms in Africa, or ensuring that gays can’t marry in a bunch of states, etc

The notion of the “atheistic utopia” was not meant to be a strawman, nor do I think it is. It is a concept that seems implicated by many things some atheists will say. Especially those who dedicate virtually all their criticism toward religion or theism in toto.

The fact that some subset of people may choose to specialize in commenting on a particular kind of thing, and criticizing a particular common problem, simply does NOT imply that they think it’s the only important problem, or that if that problem were solved, life would be utopian.

That’s a profoundly stupid idea, as should be obvious you think about it for a few minutes, and just try to apply it even-handedly to other areas of commentary.

For example, suppose a music blogger reviews relatively orthodox, tonal music positively, and atonal music negatively, because that’s what they’re an expert in, and it’s important to them, and they think that atonal music is pretty bad stuff.

Would you then infer that that they think that the death of atonal music would bring on a tonal music utopia, and everybody’s problems in all areas of life would be solved by tonal music?

Or suppose somebody has a blog—and somebody does—where they mostly comment on the antivaccination movement, and debunk it.

Would you infer that they think the antivax movement is the root of all evil, or that they think that the death of the antivaccination movement will bring on a vaccinated utopia?

Dawkins and Harris are incessantly accused of [claiming that the mere absence of religion would lead to some sort of paradise], despite their consistent disclaimers that they do not think that—that they think that religion is by and large a bad thing, but that if we got rid of religion, life would still be difficult and conflict-ridden, and there would be plenty of work to do.

Indeed life would still be difficult and conflict-ridden, and there would be plenty of work to do.. So why is religion in toto the target of our attacks? Why not devote more energy toward the pervasive (yet specific) obstacles to the good life and good society? With this concession, I cannot see why the promotion of humanism does not take precedence to the abolishment of religion. I’m not convinced that being a theist or religious is mutually exclusive with being fulfilled, responsible, intellectual, and compassionate (such values that I think most/all of us could agree with).

I don’t think you’re saying anything that most of us—either the ones who are serious about metaethics, or random gnus—don’t already know. To the extent that I try to interpret your pithy statements (e.g., about absolutism) more strongly, such that they’re interesting, I think they’re partly wrong. It’s just not as simple as you make it out to be, and a lot of people you seem to be criticizing are not wrong, or not as wrong as you think they are.

It is very possible that I have been guilty of arguing as though there is a disagreement where there fundamentally is not. It is not out of gross naivete or an intent to start unnecessary fires, but probably from miscommunication and misunderstanding. I try to direct my arguments specifically to atheists who make moral judgments / statements that refer to bedrock principles. such as “people should just do the right thing because it is the right thing to do,” – without any nuance. Am I mistaken in believing that quote to be evidence of moral realism, in the sense that it is suggestive of moral truths?

Some of us are “moral realists” in a particular sense that does not conflict with that kind of “relativism.” We think that there’s a peculiar “natural kind” of biologically normal morality, which most people (cross-culturally) share the rudiments of, for largely “biological” reasons, and which would lead to considerable moral convergence in rational reflection—i.e., that most people from most cultures would, for reasons that are not arbitrarily imposed by culture, converge to roughly similar moral schemes, in light of all the relevant facts, if they work things through rationally.

What morality is derived from biology? Some elements of morality may be made necessary for the maintenance of any social arrangement… I am not so sure they derive from biological imperatives as much as they do from mere convenience, or maybe social imperatives. However the extent of this moral convergence based on these pragmatic, maybe biological, maybe social, cross-cultural, ‘normal’ moralities does not cover issues such as abortion, infanticide, euthanasia, civil rights, sex, gender relations, fashion, etc. To base morality on biology could lead to some interesting conclusions, I think. If people are ready (and anxious) for sex beginning around 14 years old, then what basis can we have for objecting to them engaging in sex? And there’s still the big question: Okay, these ‘common moral decencies’ make sense, but what makes me obligated to follow them? That’s where the lack of ‘prescriptive objectivity’ can become an issue, it lessens (if not nullifies) the force of condemnation.

(E.g., homophobia and racism and various kinds of xenophobia are typically supported by misconceptions about The Other.)

Even if these misconceptions are cleared up, where does the obligation to treat people one way or another come from? And say that it was true that there are differences in intelligence between races.. would it then be okay for the more intelligent races to enslave the inferior ones? Objective facts do not lead to moral obligations, without the guidance of human-made values and principles.

you think its a simple matter of absolutism vs. relativism, and you’re telling us which one is right, and calling the “absolutists” stupid.

I never stated, nor meant to insinuate, that those who disagree with me are stupid.

If you do not believe the things I have been critical of, then I am not talking about you. I think I made one mistaken generalization in this thread, where I did refer to gnu atheists as a group. My bad, I own it!

And where you point to repulsive policies and actions that were motivated by religion, I understand and am aware of them, but that is not religion per se, but dogma that is the issue. Some catholics are opposed to abortion, some aren’t. Some are opposed to gay marriage, some aren’t. The main difference is a matter of who is dogmatic and who is not, not a matter of who is religious and who is not, obviously. It seems to me that the humanist vs. anti-humanists, the dogmatic vs. anti-dogmatic, and the reasonable vs. the unreasonable are battles of much more importance and legitimacy than the religious vs the anti-religious.

That’s a good deal too easy. The Catholics who forbid abortions and birth control and women priests are the ones in power. Some of the laity ignores the rules, spiffy, but if they don’t leave they still help to maintain the Vatican’s power and influence. It’s no good pretending the Vatican doesn’t have any power or influence.

If some of the laity ignores the rules, like good ol’ independent thinkers, then ought we embrace them and work with them in these instances? If the majority of the laity eventually disagree with the positions of their leader(s), then like any politician, the leaders will have to either adapt or risk losing membership, right?

I was thinking.. From what do religious leaders / institutions derive their power? From the parishioners – right? If we refuse to respectfully engage or work with parishioners who share our morals and values, are we not abandoning the very people who would be most instrumental in causing the leaders / institutions to adapt or be less powerful?

Indeed life would still be difficult and conflict-ridden, and there would be plenty of work to do.. So why is religion in toto the target of our attacks?

This is going to be long, Andrew. And that’s not my fault–it’s yours. You should know several good answers to that question by now. You have clearly not been listening to the people you’ve been criticizing.

So don’t give me any shit about “writing a book” to explain the answer to a deceptively simple question.

I’m writing so much to make it crystal clear what you should understand about our general position, but seem remarkably resistant to acknowledging.

—

S I said before, we don’t criticize religion because it’s the only problem, or the biggest problem, or even the second- or third-biggest problem, but because the other, bigger problems are even harder to solve. And because we care about truth, too.

And by the way, most of us don’t expect to ever solve the religion problem in the sense of entirely getting rid of religion, any more than we are “utopians” who expect everything to be perfect if we do. We think that we can reduce the prevalence and dominance of religion, and that’s doing some good, and that’s that’s plenty to be going on with.

Very few of us are actually as painfully naive as the accommodationists make us out to be, in either regard, or any of several others.

I think accommodationists like to paint us to be stupidly naive and ignorant in a bunch of major respects, not just to make us look stupid, and discredit us, but to avoid any discussion of the real issues, because they know they don’t have good, actually sophisticated arguments, themselves.

Or maybe I’m being too generous. Maybe some accommodationists are stupid enough that they sincerely don’t get it that our views are more nuanced than they make them out to be. I couldn’t say for sure.

—

We’re pretty fucking sick of accommodationists telling us what our priorities should be—e.g., that we talk against religion too much on our blogs.

Do I tell you what to write on your blog? Does Ophelia tell Mooney to stop writing about science-and-religion and write more about global warming, or biofuels, because she thinks he can do more good with the latter? No.

Do I question how much you post your poetry on your blog? No. I wouldn’t presume to tell you what your priorities should be.

So stop with the smokescreen about what’s the best thing we could be doing, as though we are obligated to do only the best thing we could do, or as though it’s our jobs to apportion our efforts according to the importance of various issues—no more than 20 percent gnu atheism, at least 30 percent criticizing biblical literalism and creationism, 30 percent sucking up to religious moderates, and so on…

We all know that’s not what it’s about. People don’t generally talk about their allies’ priorities the way accommodationists talk about ours. If an ally does something clearly good, you praise it, even if there’s something even better they might have done. You don’t whinge about their priorities being different from yours—at least, not nearly as much as accommodationists do about gnus.

People do talk about their enemies that way—looking for any old way to tear them down, and any excuse to say that they shouldn’t be doing what they’re doing, without having to make the case that it actually shouldn’t be done.

It’s a cheap shot. Stop it. You’re just making it clear that you’re not our friends, and see us as somebody to shut down, as if we couldn’t see that’s what you’re doing, or couldn’t tell you mostly just want us to shut up about what we’re talking about.

If not, shut the fuck up about our priorities when clearly what you’re worried about is something more basic—whether what we’re doing is a generally good thing. If you keep implying that it’s just not good enough, without saying so, and obviously suggesting that it’s just not good, advice about our priorities is just presumptious and irritating.

Until you show that you understand what we’re saying, and our reasons for thinking it’s well worth saying, your views on our priorities are just not interesting to us—to us, it’s just another subject you don’t seem to understand, but feel free to condescend about.

—

So back to the question of why we attack religion, if there are admittedly bigger problems…

Basically, the bigger problems are even harder to fix.

Selfishness, for example, is largely innate. No matter how much you talk about it, you’re not going to convince people that they’re not pretty selfish, and magically have them be unselfish, because they are pretty selfish, and that’s not likely to change on informed reflection. That’s not something you can argue them out of; it’s something you have to work around, and leverage what altruism people do also have.

Actual general stupidity is a really tough one, too. That’s not something we can fix by getting across a few key ideas that make people generally smart. Not even close. I don’t have anything like a solution to that one.

General ignorance is also difficult, not because its built-in and like selfishness or stupidity, but because it’s not a matter of a few key ideas—it’s a matter of a whole ton of stuff that most people don’t know on each of tons of topics. (Besides, many of us are scientists and educators, who do spend a lot more time addressing this more important problem—we discover things, and teach things, and try to do our bit to make the world less ignorant.) And of course, the problem of religious, unscientific ignorance is a part of that larger general problem.

So even if religion isn’t the only problem, or the main problem, or even the second- or third-most important problem, it seems to us one of the significant ones we might be somewhat effective in doing something useful about. If we’re right that religion is a bad thing on average, it’s one of the most worthy targets—it may not be the most tractable target, but it’s less intractable than the big three, and it matters a lot.

Personally, one reason I’ve taken up commenting a lot about irreligion is that I’m a scientist and a philosophy geek, who’s spent years and years learning varied science and philosophy, but when I think about what I know that other people would find particularly interesting, the answer is obvious. The two or three most important things I know that most other people don’t are clearly that (1) substance dualism is wrong—there are no souls, and (2) there is very probably no God, and by the way (3) morality doesn’t depend on those things. I’d really like to be able to talk with more people about advanced science and philosophy, but they’re just not that interested or informed, and I can’t.

Souls and God, though, that’s just interesting stuff, to lots of people. Most people do care, and would be quite interested to know that neither exists. (And morality, too, but it’d be helpful if we cleared out the religious underbrush so we could talk about real issues.) Just check the bestseller lists and see how many books talk about God and souls and such things. If people are that interested, why shouldn’t we speak up about the subject, when we have really unusually interesting things to say on the subject? What person interested in God and souls would be uninterested to learn that they don’t exist?

Keep that in mind when you criticize our priorities. It’s really quite impressive that if we’re interested and other people are clearly quite interested, and we know something they’d be very surprised and interested to know, you’d nonetheless tell us not to talk so much about that.

You might be right, and maybe we should shut up or dial it way down, but if you fail to even acknowledge that you’re really asking a hell of a lot, don’t be surprised if we tell you to kiss our shiny atheist asses, and butt the fuck out with your atheist-buttery.

Who the hell are you to tell other people not to talk about exceptionally interesting things to people who are very interested in those things, and say what they actually think?

That’s really a species of passive deception, you know. There’s a general norm of cooperation in normal human communication, and people generally do expect that you’ll prioritize telling them the things they would be most interested to know. And for the most part, all other things being equal, I think that they have a right to expect that.

For example, suppose you called somebody up and told them their dog was hit by a car and killed, but omitted the even more interesting fact that their spouse was walking the dog, and was also hit by the car and killed.

That would be pretty weird, wouldn’t it? What would you think of somebody who talked to people and habitually omitted the very facts that would be most interesting to the people they talked to? You wouldn’t think they were especially honest, would you? You might even think they were up to something devious.

You wouldn’t be wrong.

—

You asked why we criticize religion in toto, and have said other things that you suggest that we should only criticize bad religion.

The problem is that the main problem with bad religion is common to almost all religion—it’s about important stuff, and it’s dangerously wrong about things like human beings and God and morality.

Religion is one of the linchpins of many—not all, not most, but many—problems. Despite the diversity of religion, and the fact that the immediate, practical effects of some religions are worse than others, central tenets of all common religion are problematic, and have real consequences for how people think about important things. It’s not just fundamentalism that makes people unable to reason properly about various things, but basic ideas common to religion broadly.

A false belief about something important is like a loaded gun—some people may manage to be kooky in a more or less benign way, but inevitably others will take it in a dangerous direction.

As long as people seriously believe in souls and God, many people will believe in prophecy and magical ESP (mystical insight), and think it’s relevant to important subjects. It only makes sense—if there’s a God, why wouldn’t he communicate with us, and if he only communicates with us a little, why wouldn’t he prioritize telling us interesting and important things? And if there’s a supernatural soul, it’s magic—why wouldn’t it have magical abilities?

This is the kind of thing that gnus say and accommodationists hate, but it’s true and important.

Orthodox religious people—not just fundamentalists—are right to think that belief in prophecy and revelation and spiritual insight makes a lot of sense, given their premises. If they’re going to believe in the basic sorts of souls and God they do believe in—which accommodationists don’t want us to criticize much—then it also makes sense to think that God likely tells us important things, and we should take those things very, very seriously.

Likewise, if people have magical souls, why wouldn’t they expect those souls to be magically useful—e.g., giving them spiritual insight into what’s right true about important things? (Even Karen Amstrong—a paradigm of theological liberalism—does in fact make that sort of claim to obviously supernatural sources of knowledge.)

And if they understandably think that way, why would we expect them to trust scientists, when push comes to shove and science disagrees with religion? (As it does much more often than accommodationists like to admit.)

Liberal theology that eschews revelation and magical insight just doesn’t make as much sense, if you keep God and souls. What good is a theologically liberal God and a theologically liberal soul, really? If they don’t tell you what’s true and right, what do they tell you? And if they don’t tell you anything, what do they do, and how do you even know they’re there at all?

People who actually believe in God and souls don’t just believe they exist—they almost invariably think they’ve been detected, at some point, by somebody, and that that’s how they know about them. Asking them to believe in God and souls but not miracles or divine revelation or magical insight is just stupid; it doesn’t make sense, and religious people really are not so stupid that they don’t realize that. We don’t think they’re as stupid as you seem to assume they are. Telling people it’s dandy to believe in God and souls is legitimizing believing in magic, and an interventionist God—and then find some particular magic and revelations to believe in—not just some undetectable god who’s just a logical possibility you can arbitrarily choose to believe in, and go no further.

Do you really think you can let the camel’s nose in the tent and that’s going to turn out fine? And you think we’re naive?

I think it’s sadly true that there’s a slippery slope from believing in God and souls to believing in all kinds of dangerous arrant nonsense—e.g., Divine Command Theory, religious “revealed” weirdness about sex and sexual orientation and thinking that people who disagree with what God says are dangerous enemies who should be marginalized, if not fought and killed.

If you don’t undermine the ideas of souls and God, you are part of the problem of people believing in particuar ideas of God, and thinking God wants them to ban gay marriage, or that fetuses have souls and abortion and embryonic stem cell research are murder, or that distributing condoms in AIDS-ridden places is a crime against God’s very detailed plans for genitalia and spermatazoa. If people didn’t believe in God and souls, they couldn’t believe those things. Nose. Tent. Camel. Think about it.

—

Sure, it’s possible for religion to be fairly benign, and religious people often do some good things as well as bad. It happens a lot. We know that, and we say so, frequently.

And it’s certainly possible for irreligious people to believe stupid things and do the wrong things because of it. It happens frequently. We know that, too, and we frequently say that, too.

Accommodationists keep talking as though we’re saying all religion is all bad all the time, in terms of its real-world effects, and we can’t admit that some religion is less harmful than other religion, and may even do some good.

And it’s a fucking lie, Andrew, and you know it, and we know you know it.

The real argument is about the big picture, and the long run, and the bottom line, net effects, and you know it.

And we’re sick and fucking tired of accommodationists’ constant stream of straw men.

—

The fact that some religion is benign, at any given place and time, and that some religious people do more good than harm does not mean that religion per se doesn’t matter, ordoesn’t systematically make things worse, on the whole.

Saying that religion in toto is not the problem is like saying that guns don’t kill people.

Sure, an unloaded gun doesn’t kill anybody, by itself. It’s not very difficult to load, though. And even a loaded gun doesn’t kill people, by itself—but put it in the hands of a child…

But admitedly, even a loaded gun in the hands of a child doesn’t usually kill anybody. It just gives people a scare, and maybe makes a bang and a hole in a wall, right?

Still, guns are not something you want lying around everywhere, especially if there are bullets lying around, too, and children wandering about. Are they?

To be explicit: belief in God and souls is like a gun. Particular fucked-up scriptures and mystic revelations and metaphysical systems are are like bullets. They fit together in a special way, with special properties. Give a people the former, and put them an environment with the others lying around—and even people handing them the “bullets”, encouraging them to “load the gun”—and what do you think is going to happen?

Predictably, a fair fraction of them will load the gun. And sometimes, it’s going to off. And it’s unpredictable who will load the gun or whether it will go off, but it’s pretty predictable that such things won’t be rare.

And that’s our fault, if we know better but don’t say so, and pretend that guns aren’t dangerous, and just leave them lying around.

Think about what the gnu atheists are up to, in light of this analogy, and what accommodationists criticize them for.

Are they going around forcibly confiscating guns? No.

Are they lobbying for guns to be banned, and trying to create a consensus in support of that? No. Not even close.

They’re writing books and blogs explaining how guns work, and why they’re dangerous, and telling people that it’s a good idea not to have them around.

They’re also telling people that if they won’t give up their guns (basic religious ideas), they should at least realize that guns loaded with real bullets (e.g., fundamentalism, and orthodoxy more generally) are especially immediately dangerous—a clear and present short-term danger—and they should use a gun safe or gun lock or something, to avoid that especially dangerous combination.

That is all.

What are the accommodationists doing? They’re saying there’s no problem with guns, just with bullets, and even suggesting that there’s no interesting connection between bullets and guns, so the gnus are just naive blowhards and assholes for criticizing guns “in toto”; they should just criticize bullets.

And not all bullets, either! Some people are shooting blanks, or do use real bullets, but can’t hit the broad side of a barn, so bullets are mostly okay, too. (It’s only fundamenalism that’s a threat.)

Sophisticated people know that guns are fine and dandy; most guns are unloaded, and it’s only a small minority of gun owners who’d think of putting real bullets in guns! (Most religious people are completely reasonable.)

Yeah. Right. Not many people load their guns (religious metaphysics) with bullets (specfic dangerous beliefs). It’s just a fundamentalist gun-nut minority.

I suppose that’s why there’s so little opposition to gay marriage, or the distribution of condoms to prevent AIDS, or early abortions, or stem cell research, or real sex education, or the teaching of evolution, etc.

There’s only a few million people dying, and a billion or so more being oppressed, as we speak, so it’s not a big deal, and it’s certainly not a problem with religion in toto that it’s a systematic problem around the world—just a coincidence, I guess, nothing to do with the basic nature of religion. Ignore that and focus on particulars.

—

Evil prospers when good people do nothing—even the banal sort of evil, where people are mostly trying to do the right thing but laboring under dangerous delusions. Flattering their delusions has real costs. If you’re not going to keep deluded people in rubber rooms, so that you can’t keep them away from particular dangerous ideas they’re vulnerable to, and particularly dangerous situations, it’s generally better to disillusion the ones you can.

Accommodationists seem to think that if we just focus on the concrete, immediate dangers—e.g., fundamentalists opposing evolution–then that’s all we can or should reasonably do.

But even if you could just take away actual fundamentalism, a lot of problems due to religion would not disappear. They are not problems of fundamentalism, specifically, but of orthodoxy more broadly—the sort of religion the middle believes—or of basic tenets of almost all religious belief systems, and absolutely all popular, politically important ones.

For example, there’s a strong connection between supernaturalism and quack medicine. Many believers in quack medicine are vitalists and/or quantum wooists whose ideas of quantum mechanics are mixed up with supernaturalism, to whom absolutely whack ideas sound scientific and plausible, and better than actual science.

Across-the-board opposition to abortion and embryonic stem cell research is not specific to fundamentalists, either, because its not mostly an argument based on inerrantist scriptural interpretatiion, but on a certain metaphysic notion of what human beings are—which many non-fundamentalists share, including a fair number of heterodox and otherwise politically liberal religious people.

Most people who think it’s a moral imperative to treat a human embryo as though it was morally comparable to an actual woman think that it has a human soul, comparable to a woman’s, and it doesn’t occur to them that its lack of a comparable nervous system might be more relevant to its alleged personhood. It’s not just fudamentalists who think that—it’s also many non-fundamenalists middle-of-the-roaders, and a significant fraction of quite heterodox believers—e.g., New Agers and the like.

Even liberal religionists who don’t think abortion is wrong often aren’t sure, and don’t take a stand, because they think it’s a very difficult issue and the antiabortionists are too hard to argue with. They can’t make a good case that an embryo is not much like a human being in the relevant sense, because they don’t really know what makes a human being a human being, either. Even if they’d like to take a firm stand, they often don’t know how to, or feel justified in doing so, because they think that personhood is about souls and is one of those mysterious things nobody really understands—so it would be presumptious to have a firm opinion and argue forcefully against more orthodox religious people.

Even issues like homosexuality and sex education aren’t just problems with fundamentalists, or even with particularly orthodox people. There are fairy heterodox people who pick and choose from their Bibles, but are slow to pick up on ideas like homosexuality and premarital sex and birth control not being wrong—they pick and choose, but they still think the Bible is divinely inspired and, by default, relevant. They may ditch the specific lines and harsh punishments specified in Leviticus, but still think that God has a plan about that sort of thing and you should generally abide by it. They may be willing to ditch what the Bible says about sodomy or chastity, to some extent, and more over time, but they’re really slow learners because they’re confused, starting from the wrong place, and unable to simply ditch the bullshit and go looking for entirely different ways to think about things.

Those muddled middle-of-the-roaders are chronic enablers of worse forms of religion and religious moralizing. They keep affirming that Christianity is good and true, and that morality is very much to do with spirituality and that’s very much to do with religion, and something to do with the Bible—and that’s not what the more orthodox and politically conservative types need to hear. They need to hear that we don’t agree, and especially that we don’t agree that your talking about what God says is even relevant to moral choices.

And that’s the sort of idea that we need to make more popular, which liberal religionists do a pathetic job of, because they want to inherit the mantle of traditional religion.

They can’t take a firm stand against that sort of shit, and marginalize the religious right, because they sorta believe it too, or something roughly like it with lines drawn in conveniently different places, and many can’t come close to giving a non-laughable rationale for where they draw their lines. That makes them inarticulate, diffident, and politically ineffective. They’re bringing a knife to a gunfight. (Or, rather, they have guns, too, but religious conservatives’ guns aren’t loaded with blanks.)

Think about how rarely liberal religionists actually explicitly disagree with conservative religionists’ arguments. They rarely say that Leviticus and Deuteronomy are full of appalling shit, and should just be ignored, as atheists are more likely to. Instead they change the subject and talk about how Jesus wants everybody to be nice, even to fags, or just ignore the religious argument and talk about homosexuality is not a choice, so it’s not fair expect gay people to go against their natures.

Theres typically something important missing there. Even if homosexuality were a choice, and to the extent that it is a choice for some people, it’s just not wrong, and the Bible is wrong, and the Bible is pretty consistently wrong about most live moral issues.

That’s a much better, more deeply true, argument than that homosexuality is not a choice, but we usually settle for the latter because nobody’s going to say that God’s preference is fucking irrelevant, and “sin” doesn’t enter into it either way, and if it’s just a choice, it’s a perfectly fine choice. And more importantly, if the religious right’s religion tells them it’s wrong, then that just shows their religion is wrong.

We want to open up political discourse so that such things are sayable, and not unfamiliar to anyone. It just shouldn’t be an unfamiliar kind of argument—that somebody’s wrong because their religion is wrong, and it being a religious issue to them doesn’t make it a whit more respectable. It shouldn’t be off-limits to say that people’s religious beliefs are false, any more than it’s off limits to say that their other false beliefs are a problem.

If we keep acting as though religious beliefs deserve more respect than other false beliefs, we are giving religion power it just doesn’t deserve and that we can’t afford to give it.

Millions of people are dying because of that kind of nonsense being relatively immune from criticism, and we think that needs changing.

Here’s an example that may clarify some of the ambiguities in the term “realism.”

Think about money. Is money real?

Some people say simplistically that it’s obviously not real, because what counts as money is a matter of opinion and convention, and that considering money “real” is therefore literally a convenient legal fiction.

I think that’s false, and that money is actually real, at least in simple obvious cases like the money in my bank account right now.

How that’s true is non-obvious—there is some serious subtlety in the meaning of the word “real”—and if you say that money is a legal fiction, and not real, I’ll understand what you’re getting at. I’ll admit that there’s some truth to it in terms of what you personally mean by “not real,” but I’ll nonetheless insist that money is not a fiction, and is actually real—it’s just that realness is, and has to be, a more subtle property than you realize.

Real things don’t have to be specific objects, and what makes them the kind of thing they are doesn’t have to be an intrinsic property—it can be a fact about how they are embedded in a system.

For example, in an old car, you may have a valve that’s a carburetor, and another valve that’s a choke, and they could be the exact same make and model of valve, and you could interchange them. (If the car happens to be built that way). In themselves, they’re both just devices built in such a way as to function as valves, but one being a choke and the other being a carburetor is a matter of the role it plays in the functioning of the engine, e.g., controlling the ratio of fuel to air going into the combustion chamber, or something else.)

In that scenario, what makes the choke the choke and the identical carburetor the carburetor is a matter of how it relates to other things, but the choke nonetheless really is the choke, and the carburetor really is the carburetor. It wouldn’t make sense to say otherwise, because then the car wouldn’t have a choke or carburetor, and clearly it does. That’s as real as anything needs to be.

(If that’s not obvious, think about whether your car is real, or is just a collection of atoms—which aren’t real, either, because they’re made out of other things… No. Clearly what we normally mean by real has to include this sort of thing, because if it didn’t, there’s not much we could make sense of as being “real.”)

Money is like that. However you physically implement it, it’s real by virtue of playing a certain kind of role in a certain kind of system. The fact that money’s ability to play that role depends on it being used that way is not really a problem—lots of real things are basically like that.

It also turns out, on reflection, no to be a problem that for money to function as money, there has to be agreement among people that it is money. The fact that something depends on something like “opinions” doesn’t necessarily make its own reality just a matter of opinion, or fictional.

If you think it does, consider a consensus. Suppose some group comes to some consensus, e.g., that there’s a God. The proposition in question might be true or not, and we’re clearly talking about a matter of opinions, but whether there is a consensus is not a matter of opinion—irrespective of whether God, there really is a consensus or there really isn’t. (If they agree on what would count as God.) The consensus itself is real, even if it refers to something that isn’t.

Money is kind of like that—its being real depends on human agreements and commitments, but it is nonetheless quite real. Its not literally a fiction, because people don’t have to pretend that money is money—you just have to find something with certain very abstract properties, agree to treat it in certain ways that satisfy the principles of money, and proceed to treat it that way, and then it really is money.

I hope that gets across the idea that realness is not an obvious property, and is not ruled out by something depending on beliefs and commitments.

Morality is a much trickier subject, in several major ways, but when you hear somebody talking about moral realism, you shouldn’t assume that they’re missing something simple and obvious—maybe you’re missing something subtle about what they consider real, and how it’s real.

Do I question how much you post your poetry on your blog? No. I wouldn’t presume to tell you what your priorities should be.

I think that clarifies the real schism here for me. Gnu Atheists are interested in standing their ground and educating people (especially fence-sitters but also die-hard believers) using a variety of techniques while Accommodationists appear to be more interested in policing what other atheists are doing while ceding ground to bad ideas as exemplified by Wally Smith.

No. The Catholic church is an institution, and a bad and harmful one. No we don’t need to “support” people who stick with it while disagreeing with it – those people need to abandon it so that it will lose power and influence.

Tony Blair disagrees with the Vatican on some key issues, yet he joined it once he was out of office. That’s a bad and stupid thing to do.

Suppose there are members of the KKK who don’t agree with it but remain members. Should we “support” them? No.

Relatively enlightened Catholics should know by now that the Church does not represent them, and they should leave. Continuing to belong and contribute money is complicity in the Catholic Church’s disastrous policies.

If people don’t know that by now, it’s partly because people like you are part of the problem—you’re complicit in the general failure to hold Catholics accountable for their complicity.

Seriously. Imagine it was a country club that turned out to be corrupt, and to do merely unconscionable things as a matter of policy—say, blackballing Jews—and not really serious disastrous things that get poor countries overpopulated and further impoveristed, tens of millions of people killed by AIDS, thousands of abusers harbored so that they could molest tens of thousands of children, thousands of women taken in as nuns and then treated as prostitutes (by priests too afraid of the AIDS that themselves helped spread to go to street hookers), etc., etc., etc.

What exactly would it take for you to treat the Catholic Church as you would any other corrupt, authoritarian criminal organization, and recommend that people not be complicit in its activities?

What kids of crimes against humanity are religions not allowed to indulge in—while hypocritically claiming to be the arbiters of absolute morality, which you find so ridiculous—such that you would recommend any substantive sanctions?

If, say, a secular social and charitable organization turned out to do the same sort of thing—using child slave labor, allowing pedophilia and prostitution rings and covering them up, engaging in environmentally and politically disastrous programs in poor countries because of wacko beliefs by the leadership—what would you say?

Wouldn’t you say that people should jump ship and invest their time and money in some more worthy organization?

How much worse than a secular organization is a religious organization allowed to be?

Just how much lower are your moral standards for religious people than for atheists?

And given that, do you really wonder why we think religion is a bad thing?

Maybe if organizations and people weren’t religious we could start to hold them to meaningful moral standards, instead of turning a blind eye to their disastrous policies and moral hypocris, because we must respect them, no matter what.

That’s not my idea of respect. Respect is conditional. Even tolerance is conditional.